Primetime Television
by Merridian
Summary: This TV show will destroy you. And Shinji Ikari doesn't care.
1. This Is the Way the World Ends

**Disclaimer: **I do not own _Neon Genisis: Evangelion._

**Author's Note:** Chapter title taken from "Hollow Men", one of T. S. Eliot's most well-known poems.

At its core, this story could be perceived as a romance, but not quite in the traditional sense. It is a romance about two fundamentally dysfunctional characters who are so blinded by their insecurities and miscommunications that they can't really begin to acknowledge their own feelings, never mind come to terms with each other's. In doing so, all attempts at communication fail, all routs of possible understanding between them collapse, and so any possible romantic outcome gets pushed off into the background while other 'priorities' pop up. Denial has a funny way of masking itself with 'more important' matters, and life never ceases to jump at the opportunity of being one of those 'more important' matters. Throw in a fairly standard existential crisis compounded by metafictional post-modern pissings, and you've got the recipe for what makes this work tick.

I'd like to make it known that this story is almost entirely finished as of this moment. I'm in the process of sorting out and completing the final chapter, but each subsequent chapter is only subject to minor changes in grammar, wording, and/or arrangement as I see fit. This being the case, I plan on posting one chapter per week.

* * *

**Nightlife 1.0: This Is the Way the World Ends…**

Gendo Ikari held the cell phone to his ear as he fumbled with his keys, trying to get just one of them to line up properly with the deadbolt.

"Yes, that's correct." The damn thing wasn't lining up. "Negative. Yes. I believe that's what she said. No, I do not. I'm not currently at my office, so I am unable to respond to that question with any validity. Yes, I have read that report." Just get _in_ there, he wanted to say. "I got that impression as well. Fine. No. No—didn't you—what? No. Okay. Fine, make it so." He dropped the keys as he clapped the phone shut. They clattered to the wet concrete floor. He stared at them dejectedly and sighed. "Shit," he said. The floor was so damn far away, and he felt every inch of its distance as he bent over to retrieve the fallen chunks of metal.

The door opened and the hinges squealed loudly. For some reason, this apartment block never received the automatic swish-doors—he forgot the technical term for them—even though he was sure he had signed a memo to dispatch a team to correct the matter. He filed away a note to remind himself of their insubordination next time job reviews were due as he set down his briefcase in the entranceway of the dark apartment.

Beyond the entranceway was the main living room, with two windows facing the geofront. Off to the side was the kitchen. A hallway connected the living room to the master bedroom, and off the hallway were doors to the bathroom and a guest bedroom and/or storage area. There was a closet there also.

His phone went off after he set his keys on the table beside the recliner in the living room. As he reached around to turn on the free standing lamp, he stubbed his toe on the bottom of the chair and cursed aloud, the phone still vibrating its gears away against his thigh. In a flash, light illuminated the room and he pulled the phone out of his pocket.

He needed only to glance at the caller ID before tossing the phone onto the seemingly-vintage 1970's shag carpeting. It made a dull thud sound but continued to vibrate.

"Not now, Ritsuko," he said tiredly. Fingers rubbed across tired eyelids as feet guided a torso towards a chair.

He sighed as he fell into the recliner. The lever on the side of the beast jammed, but he gave it a quick series of jerks and it freed right up. He sighed again. He reached for the remote control for his fourteen inch analogue television set and the screen flickered to life after a few flashes of white light.

Tomorrow there was going to be another meeting with the Instrumentality Committee that would probably suck up most of his afternoon. The morning would see sync tests with all three pilots, but he doubted he needed to actually be there for that. He had already scheduled a meeting with the head of the maintenance division in regards to… to…

Gendo blinked. On screen, the title sequences for a show called _Japan Stigma Super Great! _played. An enormous mouse chased around a Gila monster with a chainsaw before being messily devoured by an eagle the size of the command bridge.

…He also needed to get the latest report on the most recent batch of cross-synchronization tests run on Units 01 and 00. And he wanted to check in with Fuyutsuki in regards to the hiring of a secretary, but for some reason, he had a vision that had been repeating itself continuously in his head since he first conceived the idea—

"_Ikari, a… Secretary?" Fuyutsuki's incredulous gaze cracked as soon as his smile appeared. He chuckled, then laughed, then collapsed into raucous chortles and snorts for air._

Gendo's eye twitched. On screen, the screaming face of a disembodied head melted and dripped off a pale, pitted skull. A psychopathic kitten dressed like Santa Clause chuckled sinisterly, before cutting the throats of an entire batch of civilian-dressed hostages. A crude caricature of Mickey Mouse was given a Fu Manchu goatee and a brain control device, before being shown pictures of impressionable children. He laughed conspiratorially. Gendo's face remained impassively frowning. He wanted a drink.

He rubbed his temples, and then the bridge of his nose. He _really _wanted a drink, so he lowered the footrest of the recliner and got up stiffly. Sighing, he walked out into the kitchen—stubbing his toe on a bump in the carpet, cursing, limping—and retrieved a glass from the cabinet that hung over the small sink where several dirty bowls were stacked and waiting to be cleaned. He reached into the counter beside the sink and pulled out a well-worn bottle of J&B, pouring some into the bottom of the shallow glass. He regarded the scene for a few seconds, before remembering that there should have been _ice_ in the bottom of that glass before he poured the whisky. Lumbering over to the icemaker, he got a few cubes and tossed them in, letting the amber liquid fizz and splash without care.

Feeling alone, he returned to his recliner in the other room, again tripping on the slight bump in the carpet and again cursing. His sigh was heavy and deep as his body molded to the shape of the chair. Onscreen, a woman with breasts fed a cucumber to a screaming child. Outside, the night loomed and stretched on like an anthropomorphic snake that had slithered out of Eden.

His phone went off again, vibrating its small plastic girth into the shag carpeting whose cushioning had all but rotted to barren dust. Gendo stared at the white screen on the front of the phone from where he sat in his chair. He could barely make out the caller ID.

After the second ring, the decision to answer the contraption was made. Groaning, he moved slowly toward the plastic device, feeling twice his age and tiredness as he bent over to retrieve it, only to find that it had stopped ringing the moment he picked it up. He shook his head and almost mumbled something incoherent as he set it to rest on the table next to his glass.

The television buzzed and droned on in the background as he pulled back the blinds on the wall-sized window, letting the vision of the dim geofront embed itself in his brain. The NERV complex stood almost exactly in the center of the domed expanse, and it reminded him of a pebble amid a million grains of sand. There were three or four other buildings this close to the geofront's wall, and all were designated as NERV's housing area. Surprisingly few were occupied.

A train departed from the complex and shot its way toward the edge of the dome, before curving and spiraling its way towards the surface. Gendo could almost count the number of lights in its windows.

He breathed deeply and retreated back to the chair. As he took another drink from his glass, he changed the channel, and the surrealism of _Japan Stigma Super Great!_ switched into some bizarre contortion of a familiar dream.

On screen, a disproportionate David Bowie-look alike inexplicably went ablaze as his power levels tapped into the visual spectrum. The character laughed.

"Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa! Shinji Ikari, your pathetic synchronization score of eighty-three is equal to absolute zero when compared to FLAX HARDSEED's ratio of_ over nine thousand_! And I'm not even inside your Evangelion!! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa!"

The screen suddenly shifted to show Shinji's crying form—tears wafted out of his eyelids and kind of floated in the computer-generated LCL. "N-no, how??" he cried. "How is th-th-this possible? Why a-am I s-s-s-s-s-s-so w-weak-k?" He hiccupped in LCL. Gendo tried to imagine how that tasted.

White light flashed, and the sloppily brush-stroked words "I HATE MYSELF AND WANT TO TURN EVERYONE INTO ORANGE GOO" splattered themselves onscreen—the frame was visible for only half a second. Gendo managed to make out the "HATE MYSELF" and "GOO" parts, but that's it.

"Oh Mother!" he screamed, long and drawn out, "Why have you forsaken me?!!" His crown of thorns was an optical illusion created by the way light refracted through the computer-generated LCL in the plug. "Father! Why?!"

The scene changed. A blue haired girl was taking a shower. Water ran down her pale, lithe form. "What do I want out of life?" A voice over—presumably hers—pondered. "What is this I feel towards Flax Hardseed? Where once I yearned for the appreciation of the Commander, it was replaced by a yearn for the feel of Shinji's naked flesh on mine—but now even that has been eclipsed by a craving in my loins for this Flax Hardseed. His androgyny is both appealing and revolting. I find that I am undeniably attracted to the aspect ratio of her inscrutable perfection."

Gendo's phone went off again. The sound of the device's vibration against the flimsy wooden table next to his chair was loud and unpleasant.

"Hello?" He answered it, and the person on the other end was Fuyutsuki. "Yes. I understand that."

The television screen flickered and suddenly showed a redhead copulating wildly with the somewhat effeminate brown-haired protagonist of the show. Gendo used the remote to turn down the volume as he held the phone to his ear.

"I didn't—no, I didn't have a chance to go through that yet."

"Ooh, ooh, Shinji, ooh, you stupid moron, ooh,"

"Aah, Asuka, aah, I hate myself, oh god,"

Gendo turned the volume down a little more and took another sip from his glass. Fuyutsuki rambled on.

"Inform them of their negligence," Gendo enunciated. "And place their review sheets in the—what? No, place them into the basket marked—yes—review. No, I'll look over them when the stack gets high enough."

On screen, the NERV command bridge had descended into debauchery. Atop Olympus stood Flax Hardseed, grinning maniacally as he gazed down upon the orgy below. His eyeballs were red with irritation and blood tricked out of his nose, the pallor of his flesh was nearly translucent; she was a living ghost.

Gendo tilted his head and idly wondered what the hell he was watching. "I still plan on making the meeting with the head of maintenance tomorrow," he said. "That means—yes—you'll have to sit in on the synch tests. …I don't see what the Doctor's most recent irrational outburst has to do with my… _'avoiding'_, as you say, the Pribnow box. Tell her—yes, I know that—I am aware she called, but I did not—Fuyutsuki—I—Oh don't bring Naoko into this, she's _dead_ already—" He sighed and frowned at the television set. The television Rei emerged from the shower and the screen showed a close up of her glistening skin as she dried herself.

His phone beeped at him and the screen alerted him to an incoming call.

"Fuyutsuki, your critique on my interpersonal relationships will have to be put on hold. I have a call from Section Two. Yes. I'll call you back." Gendo took it. "Hello."

The Rei inside the tube found herself confronted by a shadowy figure who was inexplicably dressed in an overdramatic black trench coat. He had bandages and cloth all over his left hand.

"Did I what? No, why would the Third Child need my authorization to visit—"

"I am Scar, the Claw." The figure on TV said to Rei. "And you are Rei Ayanami. I require your sexiness to fulfill my plan."

Gendo's attention was momentarily distracted by the scene (his reaction a mix of disgust and curiosity), but it returned to the conversation with the Section Two agent almost immediately. "I often fail to see the reasoning behind the Third Child's actions. However, he has proven himself in combat on numerous occasions and achieved the praise of his peers in his scholastic activities, so I do not see why we should interfere with his personal life so long as it does not negatively affect with his priorities to NERV. Yes. His lack of common sense often stuns me as well, but there is no reason to believe that—no, I understand that. Understood. Keep me informed as to their status—should danger arise, the First Child's safety takes priority."

He terminated the call, glancing at the television as he punched in the number for Fuyutsuki's office. As he waited, the scene digressed even more.

"I cannot deny that I am unabashedly lusting for Flax Hardseed," Rei commented as Scar approached her. His long black locks shadowed his face dramatically. "It is therefore unwise to attempt to conscript my cooperation for your plans."

The dial tone stopped. Gendo spoke: "Fuyutsuki, the scenario is divergent."

"But you are to be a tool for my vengeance, Rei. And a sacrifice of my undying love and—"

"Correct. I have ordered the agents to remain at their posts—yes, interference at this stage could have disastrous consequences." He reached for his glass, but when he put it to his lips, Gendo realized that it was empty. "No. I—no, Ritsuko has _nothing_ to do with this. And no, I'm not 'snippy' because of what happened with—hhhhhhh." He set the glass loudly down on the table and released his breath as something that was more than a hiss but less than a growl. "Rei is seeing my son, Fuyutsuki. Seeing as in _seeing_ 'seeing'. Romantically. Or at least, Shinji's daily visits to her apartment have lead Section Two to believe this much—both children are still rather solitary and awkward around each other in public." Gendo really needed another drink, so he shifted his weight in the chair as he attempted to rise.

"Incest? I've… never actually considered that possibility before," he admitted as he grasped the empty glass and shuffled toward the kitchen. "The likelihood of Shinji even _making _advances has always been low enough, but the chances of his advances being reciprocated were too negligible for me to even bother with. Rei is… you know how she is." He tripped on the bump in the carpet and mentally cursed. He caught his shoulder on the doorframe before his fall was imminent, though. The resounding thump ached like a mallet on flesh.

The television still sputtered its nonsense. "I am I," the pale blue-headed girl on screen mumbled. "I am not a doll."

Scar's dark smirk appeared underneath his unruly mop of hair. "Flax Hardseed would see you differently, I am afraid. Your mere presence has already taken a dominant turn for the worst within the scenario I have prepared. All will soon become clear."

"I wouldn't—no, I wouldn't go that far," he grumbled, stretching the shoulder that was so sure to bruise in the coming hours. "Incest is a bit much, Fuyutsuki. We cloned her—she isn't _actually_ his sister. She isn't really even a direct facsimile of…" he trailed off as the image of his dead wife careened into his brain. "No, I fail to see how their liaisons could be even remotely interpreted as incestuous. Am I what?—no, I am _not_ in denial. This has _nothing to do_ with Ritsuko!" His wrist twitched. Ice dropped into the glass. Scowling, he grabbed the glass bottle from the cabinet and set it on the counter.

"If you want to really analyze the picture, I would think it'd be closer to some bizarre form of bestiality. Rei's more of a humanoid Lilith analogue than… you know." He took a sip of the amber fluid after he poured it. "I wouldn't think her nature was _human_ enough to qualify any sort of… _romance _with her as anything other some form of bestiality. Well, I don't know if you'd call that better than incest, but it's certainly an alternative perspective."

He returned to his chair after _again _scuffing and tripping on the bump in the carpet. "I doubt it," he mumbled into the phone receiver.

The scene on television had shifted. It was a pan of the command bridge—at this point in the throes of the drug-addled orgy's aftermath; bodies lay strewn and untended like corpses on a battlefield whose ground none had gained. Breathing was loud and erratic from all directions save one: the peak of the mountain held a lone figure draped in madness, and he whose name that stood silhouetted was Flax Hardseed, and he who was also she did stare down upon her subjects in despair and penance, for his time of retribution did weigh nigh. These were the words of the narrator, who spoke in a booze-ridden voice-over.

"Gendo Ikari," the bloodshot and bleeding eyes of Flax Hardseed bored holes through the television screen. Glass from the tube bubbled and darkened, curved inwards, and melted away in patchy holes. The screen came away like melted cheese. Light flooded the apartment, but not in rays—in tentacles. Flax Hardseed stared silently as Gendo sat in his recliner, each observing the other in an insane spectacle of afterbirth fluids, particle-wave form tendrils, and melted glass.

"Fuyutsuki," Gendo spoke into the phone. "Let me call you back. There's something wrong with my television."

He clapped the device shut and awoke to find his phone vibrating against the wooden table next to the recliner. He blinked a few times, cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes, and sighed before looking at the caller ID on the phone.

"Hello." Gendo's hand reached for the glass of whisky, but he soon found that it wasn't there. He cursed mentally and started to get out of the chair. "Please calm down," he mumbled into the receiver. "No, I did _not_ forget your birthday, I assure you. If you had bothered to—so now _I'm_ the villain?"

It was meaningless rhetoric to fight like this, he knew, but he couldn't stop himself. Against a barrage of bizarrely misplaced accusations of 'other women', these kinds of fights were often knee-jerk reactionary motions that just had to be fulfilled.

"I've already made reservations at that place you like. Tomorrow, eight o'clock. Yes—" as he shuffled along the carpeting, he tripped on the bump in the floor and stumbled a few steps. "Shit, ow—no, not you, this damn—never mind. It is irrelevant." He regained his composure as her terse and unbelieving voice flooded into his ear. Accustomed to her sometimes lengthy digressions, he remained silent as he rinsed out a glass on the counter and dropped a few ice cubes into the bottom. The glass resonated with remorse.

The bottle weighed heavily in his hands as he retrieved it from the cabinet. "Yes, yes," he mumbled into the receiver. "No, I'm not just trying to appease you, I—" she interrupted him with something heavy, and it made him pause as he poured his drink. He set the bottle back on the counter and stared at his glass for a little while, seeing his reflection bounce and jump and wiggle around the ripples of the fluid. "That's different," he said quietly. His frown was deep.

"Yes, I'm still here," he sighed. "No, no. There's no need to apologize." He put the bottle back in the cabinet and picked up the glass. "I think that would be best. I'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye."

He tripped and stumbled on the bump in the carpet and cursed, but he made it to his chair without dropping his phone or his glass. The clock on the VCR above the television barked out "12:44". On screen, commercials for beer, cigarettes, and ambulance chasers flickered in sequence. Diodes threw images through cathode rays and projected needless information into his tired brain. Sound filtered through FM demodulators and poured itself into his ears like melted wax and iron. A girl wearing next to nothing presented the weather forecast for the next week, and things didn't look promising.

He sipped his whisky. Another train spiraled into the geofront and zoomed towards the pebble amid the grains of sand. He couldn't see the stars from underground.


	2. So Hologramic Oh My TVC15

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Neon Genesis: Evangelion_.

**Author's Note:** Chapter title from "TVC-15", by David Bowie.

Special thanks to my reviewers! **eva-unit-01**, Cronenberg is awesome, and I've incorporated part of Videodrome's concepts into this story. I've taken it a step further than the movie though--I try not to be a hack, just a thief. **DrendeSalkash**, this is only Shinji/Rei on the very surface, and it only comes out in maybe two chapters. While I don't mind the pairing, the underlying romance is actually... well... I'll leave that up to interpretation. **Violet Shadows**, don't worry, it gets a LOT more surreal. **Konous the Grey**, Gendo is a badass, no doubt about it. The romance will be much more apparent as the story progresses, and in fact, only that introductory chapter and the interlude (Chapter 04) do not directly involve Shinji. The rest of the story deals with Shinji rather personally... it's just that I'm doing my best to make the romance itself--the _real_ romance, not just the Shinji/Rei fluff--as subtle as possible.

I know this chapter is going to be a sledgehammer to the last chapter's cool breeze. Bear with it. All of this is important, even though it might seem trivial, stupid, and/or confusing. Things even out to some semblance of normality in the next chapter. I promise.

EDIT 05/02/2010: Strange formatting errors fixed. Again.

* * *

**Tangent 1.0: So Hologramic Oh My TVC-15**

* * *

"_It's like this," he said. "Reality exists. It is not defined as anything other than what it is—it can't be explained, or reasoned with, or even really understood. It simply is. We can't handle that—as a species, at least, we can't handle that concept at all. Our brains, psyches, whatever, they're too polluted with some bizarre DNA jump that made us capable of a form of rationalization that most animals before us never got. So instead of us simply blending with reality and existing within reality, our brains remove us from reality and give us a porthole through which to observe it and interact with it. That porthole—your porthole—that's your perspective. It's what comprises your individuality."_

_Shinji stared. "So… that's what that machine is? A… some kind of… porthole into reality?"_

_The man scratched the back of his head as he regarded the machine._

"_Not really. My porthole into reality is in my brain, just like yours is and everyone else's. That machine is a monitoring device—well, actually, that machine is my rationalization of a monitoring device."_

"_What?"_

"_What I'm trying to say," the man started, stopped, attempted to find the proper phrasing, "What I'm trying to say is this: reality becomes extremely convoluted with all these portholes looking in on it and attempting to modify it and whatnot. Our attempts at rationalizing this vague reality—essentially, our attempts at… justifying, I suppose, our existences is by communicating with each other and creating things." He motioned back toward the complicated setup of televisions and speakers and computer monitors. "This machine is my rationalization of all this interconnected activity. That's where I come in. I'm here to understand what makes everything we do keep going—basically put it like this: I'm here to figure out why humans are so screwed up."_

* * *

"Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa!" The television flickered into a darkened apartment. On screen, a flamboyant character with an unidentifiable gender flexed his/her/its muscles dramatically. "Try as you might," it exclaimed, "but your puny attempts at vanquishing my presence will continue to prove futile! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa!"

On screen, Gendo Ikari cursed and killed security guards and foamed at the mouth until his teeth fell out. Fuyutsuki sighed and imagined a naked Yui Ikari. The bridge techs below them were busy shouting things that made no logical sense—except for one Maya Ibuki, who was at that very moment daydreaming about the Doctor's unmitigated brilliance and physical perfection while simultaneously lamenting her loneliness and inability to find any ounce of appreciation from her peers.

A bunch of flashing lights on screen brightened the room like a strobe light would. "Shinji!" A sweating, bleeding, undeniably hot Major Katsuragi shouted into space. "You must defeat his new threat! All of our hopes rest on your shoulders!"

Behind her, the screen focused on the misunderstood Rei Ayanami—who, contrary to popular belief, was _not_ a mechanical ice-doll, but in fact a raging volcano of suppressed carnal desires and untapped sexual prowess. "Yes Shinji," she panted. "Come back so that I may jump your bones."

But next to her, for no apparent reason, the TV screen showed a close-up of Asuka's retina as she dramatically proclaimed, "No, you doll! I will jump Shinji's bones! I have overcome my numerous complexes and embraced the new order of the undying love! I hate you in a purely sisterly fashion that is devoid of any true malice!"

Misato vigorously nodded and pumped her fist in the holoprojection area's direction. "Asuka speaks truth!" She cried. "We're all one big happy harem family. I eagerly await your victorious return, champion-who-is-half-my-age!"

"But Shinji," the sinster voice of the villain-who-had-not-yet-been-named flooded over the command bridge's digital surround sound speaker system. "You will fail this day, and your body shall remain in a hospital long enough for me to usurp your place at the head of the plotline! _I_ shall be the protagonist, and _I_ shall steal the things you hold dear—including your ability to pilot the Evangelion housing your dead mother's soul—which I know about—and also I shall steal one or more of your love interests! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa!"

On screen, Fuyutsuki gazed dispassionately at the holoprojection as if he knew what the hell he was looking at. "A Mary Sue?" he queried softly—but just loud enough so that everyone could hear him.

"A Gary Sue!" the two-dimensional Misato seethed.

Kaji, who for some reason was still alive in the plot, pigheadedly declared, "Or is he/she/it in fact a self insertion of God itself?" I don't how one could pigheadedly declare such a statement, but he found a way!

"No!" The voice boomed. The screen focused on Shinj's shocked face. "No, you fools! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa!" Various other close ups of shocked faces dominated the television screen.

"I am neither Gary nor Mary! I am that which has oft been achieved! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa! I am the androgynous amalgamation of self-insertion and caricatured self-reflexive perfection! I am the character whose seriousness extends beyond the realm of disbelief! I am the incarnation of campy atmospheres and half-assed grammatical wordiness! I am a living fantasy of reality bending proportions! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa! No narrative can keep me bound!"

On screen, pale hands extended toward Gendo's throat and asphyxiated the poorly-portrayed, two-dimensional bastard. "My first order of making all of you my friends was to kill your commanding officer! Ha! Ha-ha-ha-haaa! Love me!"

A pizza popped up and an announcer declared that all large pizzas were now a few bucks cheaper than they were mere weeks prior, and that anyone looking to save money should take advantage of the new deal. After that, a commercial for hair products commenced, followed by an advertisement for Yebisu. Drink until you're happy.

* * *

"Position target in center, pull switch."

A virtual monster went down in a blaze of smoke. A kick barely registered in the palms of his hands. Liquid saturated the pores in his forehead and weighed down on him like some unnamable, unidentifiable guilt. This wasn't how it was last time.

"Position target in center, pull switch."

This wasn't real. It was just some sort of stupid training simulation. The skin on his hands felt like the surfaces of rubber gloves when he removed the plugsuit an hour later. It was crinkled and spongy and slightly numb due to the tightness of the suit, but he regained feeling after clenching his hands over and over and over.

"Position target in center, pull switch."

He gazed at the showerhead as water droplets cascaded down upon his lanky frame. The sharply defined ridges that poked through his skin stood in stark contrast from the slight-inward curve of his stomach. How long was he in training? Minutes? Hours? The whole day?

"Position target in center, pull switch."

The back of his head felt sore. Part of him felt like he was still inside the plug, taking that first step and failing miserably, getting his arm snapped like it was a dead sapling, having a spike burned through his brain—

"Shinji?"

Left arm. Right eye. Where had he _seen_ that before? Broken arm, gouged eye—

"Shinji, is everything alright?"

Startled by the voice, he quickly spun towards the door. He stood on his toes just enough to see over the door of the stall, catching sight of highlighted amethyst. In what he thought had been a dream, he felt her lips against his, words he couldn't remember whispered reassuringly in his ear, her blood on his hands, and the sound of thunder that heralded her demise.

"Uh—yeah, everything's fine, Misato." He eased back onto his heels and turned back toward the shower nozzle.

"It's just that you've been in here an awful long time," she said. "I was starting to get worried." Her tone suggested a jocularity that barely masked a deep rooted concern.

He couldn't see her duck as the camera rolled past her shoulder on a boom.

* * *

"This was not part of the scenario."

"The scenario remains unchanged."

"Ikari, we know this was of your doing."

Gendo took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He felt like he just had woken up from a nap that had lasted a million years.

"Ikari." The gravestone marked 'SEELE 01 [sound only]' stood directly in front of him; the other eleven pillars circled the desk like vultures. "We question your ability to act according to the scenario—"

"The scenario failed." He didn't know why he said it, but when he put his glasses back on he found himself staring directly into Kihl's visor.

"What are you talking about?" One of the pillars behind him spoke up.

"Can you please explain to me," Gendo began, "how we are even having this discussion?"

Kihl, the only member of SEELE now visible, observed Gendo carefully. "Explain yourself."

He bridged his hands across his face. "According to my calculations, this is the fifth time we have had this conversation. This is the first time that the conversation has deviated from its usual course—and it has done so for a single reason: I have been convinced that we have unknowingly been victims of a temporal causality loop, beginning sometime around mid-July of 2015 and terminating on the first of January, 2016."

SEELE was silent.

"I have linked this loop explicitly to two events—the first event is directly connected with the arrival of the Third Child to Tokyo-3—which, as you are to shortly be informed, coincides with the attack of the Third Angel, Sachiel." Gendo smirked to himself as he imagined the look of the various council members' faces. "The terminus of this loop coincides with the completion of the Human Instrumentality Project and Third Impact."

"The council fails to see the reasoning behind your outrageous claims." Kihl's words slithered out of his old and rotting lips.

Now Gendo's smirk was evident. He opened one of the drawers in his desk and pulled out a remote with a cartoonishly large red button on the top of it.

"You fail to see the reasoning behind my outrageous claims," he said, "because you do not exist beyond the boundaries of this void."

"Ikari—"

The phone rang inside his desk, and Gendo's face returned to a frown. It was Fuyutsuki on the other end.

"Magi confirms a target approaching Tokyo-3. Pattern Blue."

"We will continue this discussion later, Ikari." Kihl seethed. "Do not forget that your place in this scenario is easily replaced."

The pillars dissolved into obscurity, and lamplight returned to the room. Gendo once more rubbed his head. He sat the remote on his desk and headed for the Command Bridge.

Reality felt a little looser this time, like an old suit worn far beyond its intended lifespan.

* * *

Subroutine Six, as it turns out, was a purely fictional construct created within an equally fictional environment, and—through the use of an aptly-dubbed "Miracle Machine" designed by the MAGI—extrapolated into reality for use as a plot device.

Being a device thought up and created in fictional, "cartoon" world in which the normal rules of physics were so drastically altered as to appear unrecognizable to an inhabitant of another reality, Subroutine Six (or THE DEVICE, as it had once been known in a previous and now-outdated model) would be used to manipulate the extradimensional forces that held sway over the events and interactions of various personas within any given reality. These extradimensional forces are best summarized as being, quite simply, me.

Because I'm the one writing the story.

* * *

In an entirely related section of reality, FLAX HARDSEED gelled his hair using the reflective surface of the elevator doors as a mirror. She shot his somewhat distorted reflection a smug smirk.

"Flax, my dude, you are one hot son of a gun." Nobody used that term anymore; this is a testament to her squareness.

I use these gender-specific pronouns entirely interchangeably for one crucial reason: Flax Hardseed is androgynous, and dislikes being referred to as "it", as she finds it dehumanizing. Instead, Flax Hardseed prefers interchanging gender specific pronouns, or simply being referred to as "Flax Hardseed". Not "Flax", and most certainly not "Hardseed". Only both may suffice.

Flax Hardseed had just successfully done what a handful of enormous gozilla-like aliens had failed to do—something that countless conspiracies by countless unnamed terrorist organizations had failed to do—something even SEELE could not accomplish. Flax Hardseed had killed the commander of NERV with his own two hands. Flax Hardseed felt like she was the hottest piece of ass on the planet right about now.

He was able to do this for one reason—Flax Hardseed was an AndrogynoSue, capable of wielding twice the power of a Gary Sue, thrice the power of a Mary Sue. Within her dwelled the capacity for more reality altering mechanisms than all the self-inserts in the world put together! He had more knowledge of the series' future than the original writers of the show—and more ways to take advantage of this knowledge than angry fans who didn't understand _End of Evangelion_! AND NOT ONLY THAT, but—being an AndrogynoSue—Flax Hardseed was entirely immune to any attempts at seduction on the part of the cast!

She could charm the ladies and humor the men, she could even indulge in sexual excursions with every character in the reality—but it would be at his own discretion!

FLAX HARDSEED COULD NOT FAIL!

* * *

"Oh man, that's nothing," Makoto boasted as Fuyutsuki tried to recover his breath. "Man, if you think that's bad, you've never seen this guy shit-faced before." He nodded his head toward Shigeru, whose eyes widened and ears perked back.

"Oh no you don't—" Shigeru started to say, but was cut off.

"I remember this time, man, back in college—what, second or third year, a few months after meeting you, right?—"

"No, no! Don't even—I know where this is going—"

"Aw I don't see what you're so embarrassed by—I mean, she didn't _entirely_ resemble a horse. More like a-a goat or… something with more fur—"

"Hey shut up with that right now!"

Fuyutsuki snorted while he still had his stein over his face—it took a bit of effort to keep the alcohol from spewing out of his nose, but he managed. Meanwhile, Kaji just shrugged and smirked.

"Hey, you guys wouldn't know what it's like coming around your girlfriend's apartment and finding _her_ girlfriend answering the door," he said.

Whatever insult Shigeru had been about to throw at his coworker died on his lips, and Makoto's laughs died into a curious drunken request to continue.

Kaji's eyes half-lidded themselves as he went on. "Yep, that was the day I found out about Katsuragi and the Doc," he sighed. "'Course, if the amount of empty bottles and cans all over the place were any testament to the endurance of their livers, it was also a pretty good indication of their states of intoxication the night before."

The Sub-Commander's eyes bugged out. "That's insane—you're insane," he stuttered. "There is no way the doctor _I_ know would—oh, for god's sake, Ikari—" he mumbled the last part under his breath as he grimaced. "There had to have been some mistake; maybe they just got really drunk and…"

"You know that smell," Kaji started to describe, but Kouzou would have none of it.

"Okay, that's it." He put his hands up in defeat. "I don't want to hear any more of that. I have enough trouble listening to the break room gossip chatter among people I don't even _know_. But if I listen to any more of your college stories, Ryoji, all I'll be thinking about is—oh Christ, it's already started." He put his fingers over his eyes and rubbed.

"How do you think I feel?" Kaji took a drink.

"It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that I'm their boss," Fuyutsuki rambled. "I don't know how I'm going make it through the next debriefing session. Katsuragi's on one side, Akagi on the other—"

"The Major… and _Doctor Akagi_?" Makoto stressed, apparently befuddled.

"That's…" Shigeru grasped for words. "That's actually really creepy, now that I think about it."

"Yeah," Makoto agreed. "Very." He'd never quite see his commanding officer in the same light again, after that.

"Well, it wasn't so bad," Kaji relented. "I mean, Rits wearing that black negligee wasn't what I'd call an unpleasant image—"

"Ugh, but still," Shigeru interrupted. "Doctor Akagi. Man."

"Yeah… Not-so-subtle undertones of sadomasochism in that one," Makoto commented.

Shigeru agreed, "Dominatrix to the max—"

"Hey." It wasn't so much an utterance as it was an urgent request to cease and desist. "Please." The old professor rubbed his eyeballs and cringed.

"She's actually rather sweet, once you get past that cold scientific exterior—"

* * *

"Class, have the first ten chapters of _Red Harvest_ read by next time," Kaji's day was long in the making. "And I expect that report on _Nova Express _on my desk come Friday—that's half of this quarter's grade, you know." His commands were barely audible over the sound of the students marching out through the classroom door. "And don't forget to read Blake's 'Auguries of Innocence' for Friday as well—class discussion on that…" he trialed off when he knew the noise had won.

By the time the ruckus was over with, only a single student remained. Kensuke Aida stood in front of Kaji's desk expectantly.

"Mister Ryoji?"

"Ah, Aida. What can I do for you?" Kaji threw on a mask of pleasantries as he pulled his leather briefcase onto his desk and numbly waited for the end of the day.

"I—well I have my report done, uh, can I just turn it in now?" The spectacled boy waved a stapled set of papers.

"Sure." Kaji took the packet and slid it into his briefcase. "That it?"

"Ah, no…" Kensuke paused uncertainly. "Did you have a chance to read what I emailed?"

"Oh—the story?" The clasps for the strap of the case snapped into place.

Kensuke nodded.

"I did, actually, what little you sent—I take it that it's a work in progress?" Kaji grinned as he hoisted the shoulder strap over his arm.

"Yeah, it is. I've done a bit more since I sent that off, but yeah—and I've—well," Kensuke looked around for a second, verifying the emptiness of the classroom. "I'm not the only one working on this thing—it's sorta collaborative," he said. "Shinji's got some great ideas, but he can't really write them down very well, so we've been working together on this thing. We're basing it off of—"

"It's a fan fiction, isn't it?" Kaji dug for something in one of the desk drawers.

"Uh huh," Kensuke nodded again.

"Yeah," Kaji said as he pulled another wad of papers and haphazardly shoved them into an open flap of the briefcase. "Off of ah, whatsit—an old cartoon from back when _I _was in high school. _Evangelion _somethingrather, right?"

"I'm… kind of surprised you even knew what it was from," Kensuke rubbed the back of his head. "I figured me an' Shinji were the only ones in the school who'd watched the thing."

"Nah, Makoto down in computer sciences is a huge geek for that stuff," Kaji replied. "Reading about those characters again made me feel kind of nostalgic—if I remember right, it got really dark towards the end."

"Yep—the main character goes nuts and everyone gets turned into orange sludge!" Kensuke's reply seemed needlessly enthusiastic—almost forced.

To Kaji, that sounded eerily familiar, and he couldn't quite place why. "It's been awhile, so I'd have to watch the series again to remember what you're talking about."

"It's nice to know that fan fiction isn't given a bad rep by _everyone_," Kensuke said. "My folks kind of laughed at the concept, and the few others I talked to just sorta call it a stepping stone into writing original fiction."

Kaji shrugged as he looked at the clock on the wall. "I dunno, from an English teacher's perspective, I'm looking at a student willing to spend some time creatively expressing himself—and that's something that I can never downplay. As for fan fiction…" he trailed of and shrugged again. "To be honest, I think writing really good fan fiction can be even more difficult than writing really good original fiction—I mean, since you're using characters that were defined by someone else, you—as the writer—have to find plausible reasons for their non-canonical actions and thoughts. And not only that," he added, "I would think that you'd have to find equally plausible avenues for new conflicts and drama and whatnot. Otherwise you'd just be rewriting what's already been written."

"Right, see—right!" Kensuke exclaimed. "That's what Shinji and I were all about with this thing!"

They were interrupted by the sound of the school nurse's rarely used sing-song voice: "It seems someone's late for a doctor's appoint—oh shi—Aida, ah, how are you?" And suddenly, the air inside the classroom went from easy going relaxation to that of impenetrable stillness and awkward maneuverability.

The younger Akagi stood in the door, a polite—if forced—smile plastered to her face.

Kensuke, not unaware of the possible implications behind what the doctor's earlier comment could have been, suddenly found his brain mechanics slowing to a dull limp. "Uh…" He said the only thing he could. "Hi, Ms. Akagi."

Kaji's eyes were closed and his head was tilted to the side slightly. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Hi Doc," he mumbled.

"Um, I'm just going to leave." Kensuke shuffled toward the door as he looked at Kaji in a somewhat different light. "I'll leave you two to your uh… your doctor's appointment. Or something." He cast a strange eye at Ritsuko as he edged past her.

"If that boy were going any faster, he'd be sprinting," Ritsuko muttered as soon as he was out of earshot.

* * *

"I actually like Burzum," Makoto admitted.

"Really?" Shigeru raised his eyebrows from his station.

"Yeah," he continued. "I mean, to me, generic black metal is like Darkthrone's second, third, and fourth albums. Burzum's stuff doesn't really sound anything like that stuff—it's a bit more textured, and the drums aren't nearly as pronounced."

"I have to admit, the only black metal stuff I ever got into was Emperor." Shigeru pressed a few buttons at random. "And Agalloch," he added as an afterthought.

"Well, Emperor practically redefined black metal with each album they released—and essentially made all the purist assholes look real dumb in the process." Makoto sighed. "That sure was one amazing band. As for Agalloch, I think they kind of grew out of black metal after their first album. They really diversified—that's one the reasons I like 'em a lot anyhow; they didn't feel the need to constrain their style."

Shigeru nodded as he pretended to work on his report on the recent psychograph tests. "Yeah, I noticed that they incorporated a lot of post-rock stuff from thereon out," he said.

"Yeah… what a great band." Makoto stretched his arms and cracked his neck, then he hit a few buttons on his keyboard. The Commodore-64 terminal buzzed and a few lines of text hit the screen.

Shigeru sat at his workstation and stared at green pixels, imagining he was someplace else. He imagined that, instead of being one of the last lines of defense for all of mankind, he was a mundane and blasé salary man with no aspirations toward career enhancement or promotion. It wasn't hard.

"I watched episode thirteen last night, finally." Makoto's voice stirred him out of his reverie.

"Oh yeah?" he asked.

"Yeah," the coworker confirmed. "I uh, thought it was okay."

Shigeru nodded his head tiredly. "Yeah, that means you're into the third DVD right?"

Makoto nodded and quietly yawned.

"That's cool," he said. "That's where it starts getting good. The first two discs are a pain in the ass, if you ask me. The protagonist whines too much without any reasonable provocation, and when that redhead shows up, the whole thing turns into some kind of cliché." Shigeru punched a few more buttons. "Episode eleven, though. That blackout? That's where it starts getting good." His chuckle was dark and guttural.

"I did notice that," Makoto responded. "It's like the writers finally decided on showing some depth to the characters. And the humor improved too—it wasn't so…" he searched for a proper word, but Shigeru provided it for him.

"Stupidly dependant on clichés."

"Yeah," Makoto confirmed. "Yeah, like that."

Shigeru leaned back in his chair. "So what'd you think of the episode?"

"Well, I mean, I thought it was pretty creative having that sort of living computer idea." He shrugged. "If it weren't for the fact we've already faced a similar situation, I'd probably have been a lot more impressed than I was. Besides, we've got the Magi—and they're biomechanical circuits anyhow."

Shigeru nodded. "But…?"

Makoto sighed. "But it just seemed like it hit a little too close to home, you know? The characters all look a little too much like… well, like us, really, but that isn't what gets me. Except for all the scenes with that uh, that guy—Flax Hardseed, or _whatever_ his name is—most of the series practically rips off our lives." He paused. "…Except for all the weird religious references. I don't know where they got all that stuff."

"I know what you mean," Shigeru said. "That's what my impression of the whole series was the first time I watched it. The end is great though. I always get nostalgic when I watch the very end, and I've never really figured out why." He made a grunt. "Strange."

* * *

The vice-principal of New Hideki High School stared down at the most recent batch of rather dismal national test scores. The dreary packet of paper hung loosely off the side of his desk like a rag drenched with gasoline, mocking him, waiting for him to pick them up and start an angry conflagration of accusations and hatred that would engulf the rest of the school's staff. He knew that much already, and he hadn't even broken the seal yet.

"Fuyutsuki," his intercom buzzed, and it was the only guy in the whole building that could pull rank over him.

He sighed and punched the button to speak. "Yes?"

"I have a report on my desk," the voice replied. "The superintendent is under the impression that our cafeteria budget is too big."

"So what's the report on your desk?"

"His suggestion on cutting costs." The voice blinked out, but returned—as if in afterthought. "Did we receive the latest national test scores?"

"Uh… yes."

"Excellent. How do they look?"

Fuyutsuki thought they looked like a natural gas leak just _waiting_ for that spark from a cell phone that would start an uncontrollable inferno. "I haven't opened them yet," he said carefully. "I've been preoccupied with… managing the school's cafeteria budget." He winced, knowing that was a stupid thing to say.

His only reply was that of a brief "ah". A minute later, the voice returned: "Very good, as you're handling that already, I'll have my secretary run this report over to you."

Fuyutsuki winced again and sighed. Yet _another_ thing that he had no intention of actually getting done. "Understood," he confirmed. "I'll make it a point to get you copies of the test scores."

As the intercom clicked off, Fuyutsuki leaned back in his chair and sighed.

"This bureaucratic nonsense is bullshit," he said.

* * *

_Shinji spoke. "I don't understand what you're trying to imply."_

"_All of existence—as far as our brains are capable of understanding and perceiving—is a living organism. The fundamental problem you keep running into is your belief that reality is singular in nature—and that it's structure adheres to your concepts of 'order'. Basically, the whole fault of each argument you throw up is the very foundation of your perspective." He reached for a cup of coffee on his desk and took a sip. "You're all aware that multiple realities exist, and you all know that your actions affect and are affected by the events that transpire in these other universes, but you seem to shut that awareness out of your conscious mind in favor of stupefying ignorance. I guess you simply haven't learned how to rationalize that sort of world-view yet._

"_Anyway, as I was saying, think of the universe as a living being. Well, actually, think of the universe as you know it to be merely a piece of a much larger living being. Okay. Now, think of the realities introduced thus far. Each one exists as a byproduct of each other one, but none of them take priority in terms of survival. Each of these 'universes' is dependent upon the others, surviving through an intricate set of metaphysical mechanisms that keep the whole thing in working order. It's literally a living entity, so incomprehensibly vast in size that we're smaller than bacteria to its intellect."_

* * *

The West bled across an evening sky. A menstrual lunar sphere hung in the star-punctured abyss, like some overseer of a dead and barren world. There was a head on the horizon, and its pallor was rivaled only by the audacity of the false sea that lapped at his feet. Naked, he stared across this rotting world, and he breathed. It was the very first breath of his entire life.

Shinji awoke with a start. His heart practically leapt out of his chest as his eyes snapped open, and his limbs shuddered and twitched into alertness. He fell onto the floor and grunted when he hit his head.

* * *

Toji leaned against the kitchen counter as Kensuke fixed himself a pot of coffee. Shinji adjusted his collar as he rummaged around for a coke from the fridge.

"Do you think we're missing something?" Shinji mumbled.

"What?" Kensuke hit the side of the coffee maker with the palm of his hand. "The damn thing's broken again. I swear, it's just like the last place we worked at…"

Toji grunted a short smirk.

"I mean that it feels as though something's missing," Shinji replied. He sighed and straightened, leaving the refrigerator door open. "Apart from the coke. I guess I'll settle for a Dr. Pepper."

"Gimme one," Toji held out an empty hand, and it was filled with a can cool to the touch.

"Shinji, I think the only thing we're missing is some kind of vast, life-altering improvement," Kensuke commented. "You've got that, so I don't see why you're complaining."

Shinji popped the Dr. Pepper and took a sip. "No, it feels like something just isn't right. Everything's… different, somehow."

"We're tugged aroun' by immeasur'ble forces beyond our feeble comprehension," Toji slurred. "No doubt Shin-man 'ere feels jus' a 'int of da factors that led ta dis very moment."

"As eloquent as that might sound, I think the only factors that lead to this conclusion involved the twenty-five steps between the kitchen and our cubicle." Kensuke's deadpan response was accompanied by a low growl directed at the coffee maker. "Goddamn piece of junk."

Shinji stared at the brown label that comprised the side of the can, and the droplets of condensation that trickled down its surface reminded him of something vague and hazy and dreamlike, as if he recollected something from a life he lived only in parallel—as if everything in the room, everything in that moment was reflected in each bead of condensation and projected onto a bigger picture comprised not of sight or of sound, but of pure information that weaved and ebbed and solidified and condensed into everything that was perceivable—as if he observed his life from a fluid perspective that shifted and changed—as if all identity was nothing more than an indefinable parallax view.


	3. But I Remember When We Were Young

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Neon Genesis: Evangelion_.

**Author's Note: **Chapter title is a line from Joy Division's "Insight".

Thanks again to the folks who reviewed! **Violet Shadows**, things are going to cool down for a while, so the fragmentation isn't going to make such a huge come back until the last two chapters. **cevgar**, thanks for the review! I imagine I probably chased ya off with that last one, but everything works out in the end. Curiously enough, I've found that the stupidly mundane things often make for the best stories once they're blown out of proportion and mixed with bit of the absurd. **Fresh C** & **NemesisZero**, keep reading; you ain't seen nuttin' yet!

* * *

**Nightlife 2.0: But I Remember When We Were Young**

"Okay, Misato, jeez."

Shinji tapped the code into the panel beside the door. It slid open with a whoosh and beckoned him inside.

"I know that. Yeah, she told me this morning on the way to school."

He had to cradle the phone on his shoulder as he stooped to pick up a third bag of groceries, stumbling a few steps into the apartment to set down his load.

"Alright. Then I'll see you when you get back." He tapped the END button and slid the phone back into his pocket. "Sometimes I wonder…" he mumbled, setting his shoes down.

After he put the groceries away, he relaxed in the living room and flicked on the television. It hummed to life as he sighed, reflecting over the events of the day. School had largely been uneventful. Asuka had continued to give him the cold shoulder. The interactions with Kensuke and Toji had continued to feel somewhat forced. Misato remained distant even during their routine interactions—things that remained ever more elusive in the more recent weeks as NERV heightened its security measures and demanded more exercises involving the Major's time.

On screen, an enormous robot let out an inhuman roar and tackled a giant monster. Voices screamed chaotic babble while trumpets flared in the background—some sort of inevitable victory loomed.

"Cut missile defense connections to the left ventricle overpass—that should buy him enough time to—"

"It's blue—pattern confirmed! Data system overlay synchronizations are positive, but it's rejecting the signals!"

"Berserker?!"

"Dear God!"

Shinji's half-lidded eyes sucked in this information without expression. Tomorrow there was supposed to be a trig test at school, and after that, a synch test in the afternoon. He winced at the thought—ever since the Twelfth, he felt like people were acting differently around him. The NERV staff did their best to hide it, but it still showed; the bridge crew especially. He felt something in their gazes, something cold and fearful—sometimes he felt like it was merely a reflection of what he saw in himself.

"Yes, yes! It's all going according to plan!" On screen, a pale, frazzled, blood-shot psychotic stared down on the holoprojection of the scene from atop the tiered command bridge.

His phone went off and vibrated against his thigh, letting off a high whine as it did so.

"Uh, hello?"

"Input signal down. Immediate ejaculatory sequences initiated…"

Shinji nodded mutely, haphazardly staring at the screen. "Yeah, I know. No, I was there. You want to what? Oh, o-okay, let me just—oh no, it's fine. Yeah, sure, whatever's good. Alright. See you soon."

"Terminal exertion rate beta reached—lymph nodes can't handle the stress! We'll have to abort the—" The television spouted its nonsense. A mammoth-sized humanoid on screen let out an exhausted roar.

Shinji clapped the phone shut and slid it back into his pocket. He blinked and sighed and yawned and stood up, stretching a little as he started for the bathroom. The television flickered on behind him, spewing its pasty images out into the empty room.

Water and steam surged out of the showerhead. Shinji striped down to his skin and stared solemnly at the cascade. There was some mildew by the drain that he'd have to clean later. He'd probably want to do that before Asuka noticed it—she'd go ape-shit about the dumbest things sometimes. Minutes passed as fluidly as the suds that slid into the drainpipe.

The doorbell went off just as Shinji had buckled his belt around his pants. He pulled on a white t-shirt as he hit the button that opened the door. Kensuke stared at him, raising an eyebrow as he tugged at his own hair, as if to signal something. Shinji just stared at him oddly.

"Just take a shower?"

Shinji stood aside and let his friend enter the apartment. "Yeah. I needed some refreshing, so…" he shrugged and Kensuke led the way into the living room. "Is it raining out?"

"It was," the spectacled boy replied. "It's been teetering off and on all day. I keep expecting a downpour, but so far it's just been indecisive cloudiness."

Shinji hummed his admonishment and stood in the doorway to the room. "You want a drink?"

The television showed a purple thing getting hit with an explosion. A few unintelligible lines were shouted out over the speakers.

Kensuke tore his gaze from it to shake his head in Shinji's direction. "Nah, I'm good—well, actually, you have a Dr. Pepper?"

Shinji frowned and started for the kitchen. "I don't think—" He opened the refrigerator, and the door held a single can of said beverage. Next to it was a Coke. "Hm, I wonder if Misato brought this home from the NERV vending machines," he mumbled to himself.

"What?"

"Nothing. Here's your drink—glass?"

"Nah."

Shinji handed him the can, and the two of them popped tops in unison. On screen, a few close-ups of hands revealed blood and spit, and they were followed by portrait shots of screaming faces and torn up braces.

Shinji cleared his throat.

"The Class Rep's gotta crush on Toji," Kensuke stated, breaking the silence.

"What? Hikari? No way." Shinji couldn't help but be flippant in his reply. "What makes you think she's into Toji?"

"Haven't ya seen 'er glancing at him during before lunch breaks?" Kensuke asked. "The way she's peering at 'im from the corner of her eyes…" he squinted in thought, sipping his soda. "There's something there, definitely. If I were paranoid, I'd say she's been watching him, monitoring him for some super-secret plot."

Shinji rolled his eyes. "Sounds like you've been hitting the sci-fi racks too hard."

"Says the boy who pilots an Evangelion," came the reply. Shinji winced and choked on his gulp. "Anyway, I kinda dismissed that theory as well. It's Hikari, after all."

"The Class Rep falling in love with the class jock is pretty lame, though." Shinji commented. "I still have a hard time believing it."

"Oh man, look at the evidence!" Kensuke exclaimed. "Haven't you seen the way they bicker in class? They're like an old married couple already—they just don't know it! Speaking of that, how's Asuka doing?"

"What—wait, how's that even related to—" Shinji stopped in mid-sentence and realized what he was saying. "Sh-shut up!"

Kensuke chuckled. "They do that, too."

"Oh, stop giving me such a hard time. You're worse than she is, sometimes," Shinji complained, referencing his guardian.

The geek just grinned and turned his attention back to the TV, where a character analogue groaned with anticipation at seeing a giant robot. "I remember this show," he said. "It used to come on back in the day. I'd forgotten they were airing reruns of this."

"I don't even know what it is," Shinji said. "I think Asuka's been watching it off and on."

"Asuka, huh?"

Shinji shrugged and sipped his drink.

"I wrote a story based on the show awhile back," Kensuke resumed course. "I don't even know what happened to it now—probably buried under caches of internet porn and army stuff in my PC."

"You're not supposed to admit that sort of thing," Shinji coughed.

He received a shrug. "Between that and all the digital copies I kept of the countless peeping tom expeditions Toji and I have run over the past few years."

"Ahm… I think that's illegal."

Another shrug, followed by a roll of eyes. "Who's gonna arrest us?" Kensuke sighed. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's not like we photographed their faces or anything. Complete anonymity. I don't see why you're so frazzled about it." When he didn't receive a response, he dug a little deeper. "Asuka's a goldmine for the market, though—Toji helps with distribution, but I tell you; that girl's got sharp senses. It's been a pain in the ass getting photos lately, she's so sharp—"

"Okay, I don't want to hear any more of this." Shinji, red-faced and frowning, kept his eyes focused on the television. A girl was taking a shower.

"Kinda looks like Rei," Kensuke grunted, staring at the screen.

"Huh?"

"The girl in the shower. She kinda looks like—" Kensuke's phone vibrated in his pocket, and he groaned and leaned back as he fished for it. "Shit," he cursed absently. "Hello?"

Shinji glimpsed him out of the corner of his eye, idly wondering what he should do. Leaving the room would provide Kensuke some semblance of privacy while he was on the phone, but it might seem rude—then again, if Kensuke wanted privacy all he'd need to do was leave the room _himself_—otherwise, how could he blame Shinji for overhearing the conversation?—that is, of course, assuming he _would_ blame him—which he probably wouldn't, since it's Kensuke—

"What? Now? What do you mean, now?" Kensuke sat up straight, his Dr. Pepper on the floor beside him. "I can't leave now, I just got here—oh come on, it can't be _that_—what? No, it's just up the road, sorta. Yeah. Uh-huh. No, I did it already." He glanced at Shinji, frowning and shrugging helplessly. "I know. Yeah, that's what they told me. I can't help that any. Whatever, I just hope it doesn't—I said—I said I hope it doesn't boil over into something impossible. Yeah." He sighed. "Fine, okay. I'm on my way."

Kensuke shut the phone and moved to stand. "I gotta go home," he said. "Sorry about this, I didn't expect to have things to get done today. Shoulda known, though. Oh well."

Shinji offered a smile as he walked to the door. "It's fine. I know you're probably busy with other things."

Another shrug. "Yeah, something like that. It gets real tiring sometimes." He slid his feet into his shoes and opened the door. "See you tomorrow, Shinji."

"Yeah, later."

The door swished shut and Shinji tried to think of what to do with himself. He returned to the living room and retrieved the rest of Kensuke's Dr. Pepper, emptying it out in the kitchen sink. Then he sat back down in front of the television fully intent to let his mind just wander and doze.

And then the apartment's phone started ringing. Shinji moved to answer it, but remembered how terrible he was at taking messages, and he wasn't particularly in the mood to talk to anyone over a connection. Instead, he leaned his back against the wall.

After a few rings, it stopped. The automatic message machine clicked on and started recording. Little metallic wheels ran tape through magnetic guts.

"Katsuragi… hi." The voice was Kaji. Shinji frowned, but still did nothing to pick up the phone. "Listen," the voice continued. "I know you're out on a date right now… with… um, _me_, but ah… hmm, this isn't where I'm going with this. I actually called for Shinji. Is Shinji there?"

"Force the plug! Empty vascular sacs! Pouring derision magnitude through coolant pipes!" Voices on screen shouted babble. Shinji stared at the answering machine. The lamp flickered.

"…Guess not," the disembodied voice mumbled. "Anyway, Shinji, I know you'll be seeing me in a few hours, after I drop off Misato and whatnot—but don't be fooled. That me isn't really me, Shinji. I… I know it sounds weird, but you'll have to trust me on this—right now, I'm not who I appear to be. I'm a different me. There's—gah—_shit_—I have to go. I'll meet up with you later—" the line went dead after a roar of gunfire and yells. The machine clicked into silence. The little red light started blinking.

Shinji frowned. Would it be smarter to erase Kaji's drunken-sounding ravings before Misato got home, or wait until she discovered the message and possibly let it wreak havoc on her renewed relationship? The message _was_ directed at him, after all. That he reserved the right to delete it was understandably presupposed.

He got up from the floor and his foot slid on a piece of paper.

"What the—?" he reached down to pick it up, and it was in Kensuke's handwriting. It was a list of tips, it looked like, bulleted and fragmented. Parts of it were underlined:

_--Keep characterization consistent. Unless you're dealing with alternate realities._

_--Nobody cares about your problems, and nobody cares about the character's problems unless you can make them relevant to the reader. _

_--Angst is not good. If a character angsts, provide comic relief or bash the character. Or kill the character. Character death is always a good thing. Even when your audience hates it._

_--Chapter length doesn't matter. Douglass Adams made millions of dollars on his books, and he had chapters that consisted of a single paragraph._

_--Write about what you know. Make the rest up as you go along._

_--Fan fiction is evil. That's why you keep it in a shoebox under the floorboards next to your porn stash. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST THIS BE PUBLISHED ONLINE. It would disgrace my honor._

_--Fan fiction is good. I don't know why, but it is. Somehow._

"What is this?" The creases were well-worn and the paper was fuzzy from travel. He shrugged to himself and folded it back up and slid it into his pocket, immediately forgetting why he had gotten up to begin with. Finding himself thirsty, he idly supposed it had been to get a drink.

As he poured himself a glass of water, he pondered the notes in scribbled handwriting. Had Kensuke really written those things? Did Kensuke really write fan fiction? Why would he want to? He sighed after taking a long drink and shrugged.

"I guess it really doesn't matter."

The door opened and Misato's utterance entered his ears. "I'm home, Shinji."

"Misato?" Shinji poked his head into the hallway to see his guardian removing her shoes. "I thought you were out with Kaji until late. It's barely seven-thirty."

She shrugged and tossed a few locks of hair over her shoulder. "Yeah, but I have to be at NERV soon. Ritsuko must have bumped my shift up for some diagnostic supervisions… I swear she's jealous." She mumbled the last bit to herself.

"What?"

"Nothing," she supplied with a smile as she reached into the refrigerator. "So how was school?"

Shinji shrugged noncommittally. "It was alright." He gulped more water.

"Still keeping those grades up?" She popped the top to a can of beer.

"Shouldn't you already know?" he winced at his own snap, but shrugged it off and refilled his glass.

Misato sighed, but said nothing in response. Instead, she leaned against the counter for a little while, and then she drifted aimlessly into the living room. Shinji stayed in the kitchen.

"Shinji, there's message on the machine. Were you here to answer it?" Shinji rolled his eyes.

"No, Misato. If I had been here, I'd have answered it."

She "mm"ed her response, and he heard the click of the machine's button. The message played, Shinji frowned again, and he also silently cursed himself for not deleting it sooner.

He heard Misato laugh a little nervously. "That's weird," she mumbled. "Kaji… always being weird, huh?" she called out. Shinji assumed it was rhetoric. "Don't pay any attention to him, okay?"

"Alright." Whatever.

"I'm going to take a bath now," Misato said as she appeared once more in the kitchen. "Where's Asuka?"

"She's off at Hikari's—didn't you say that on the phone this afternoon?" he responded. He received a blank look. "Maybe not; I can't remember now."

"You two fighting again?" she smirked.

Shinji shrugged his shoulders and turned away to face the sink. "I don't know. I don't understand her at all."

"I bet she's jealous of the thing you and Rei have going on…" Misato let the statement hang in the air as she leaned her forearms on the back of a chair, curving her back like a tiger.

"Me and Rei—Misato!" he flinched. "There's nothing going on at all! Nothing like that!"

"Uh-huh," sound oozed slowly through ruby lips. "You don't have to be so shy… I bet Asuka's upset over that too, y'know." She giggled as she straightened and backed out of the room.

Shinji said nothing but his face was burning. He didn't move until he heard the water in the bathroom start running. He relaxed the hand that he hadn't even realized had cramped up from tension. He let out a sigh he hadn't remembered holding in. He unclenched his jaw. What was wrong with him? Why was he so uptight?

He gazed at the sink for a while, but the sight offered neither solace nor satisfaction. Rust stains stood out on the corners as though reality itself was being corroded, as though the surface of perception was being slowly dismantled by an otherwise innocuous metaphysical reaction.

Shinji emptied himself of the existentialist crap and tried to convince himself that a walk in the night air would let him cool off.

"I'm going out for a little while, okay?" he called from the door as he stuffed his feet into shoes.

The bathroom door opened up a little and Misato poked her head out. Her hair was wet. Droplets of water slid down her exposed shoulders toward two unseen breasts, but some just careened into the hardwood floor.

"Don't be out too long with Rei," she smirked, her hand adjusting the towel she that was trying to sit on her head.

"I won't—gah, I'm not going out to see…" he sighed again. There was futility in lying to her, since she could just look up the Section-2 reports and locate his whereabouts anyhow—that was probably how she 'knew' about his trips over to Ayanami's apartment to begin with. Then again, this perpetual teasing was just something that _had_ to be fulfilled; it was a knee-jerk reactionary movement done to complete some sort of unspoken cycle—action/reaction, some self-fulfilling prophecy spelled out by the Tao of the situation, as though it were painstakingly constructed under a microscope just for them to continually relive.

The door whizzed shut behind him and he started on down the concrete hall. It was cooler than usual, but not so bad. The concrete was always slightly wet in this area of the building, and the fluorescent lights made it sparkle a little bit. The faint drizzle was partially to blame also.

His phone rang, and he answered it dully. "Hello?"

He stopped in front of the stairwell. His brow creased. "Um," was all he said.

Finally, he started walking again. A few larger drops of rain pattered against the exposed concrete rail, but they were few and far between. There were four flights to the ground.

"But I'm in the middle of going someplace right now," he half-whined. "Why? What did you—the message you left was really weird, though. Weren't you just—huh? Of course not!" Patters of footfalls against the cool rock aggregate echoed upwards and below him. "I don't know—eleven, maybe? Fine. No, I'm not angry, I'm just… yeah. That's it." He sighed as his foot hit the ground. The vending machines in the outer lobby glared back at him in anger and frustration, so he dug around in his pockets for a few coins.

A drink landed in the mouth of the beast with a 'thunk!'. "I just wanted to get out of there for a little while. I've been on edge for… I don't know _what_ it is. You do? Fine, I guess. Yeah." He popped the top and fizz slopped up, splattered on the sidewalk. The drizzle-mist of the air reached deep into his nostrils as he inhaled. "Okay, that works. See you then." Shinji closed the phone and shoved it into his pocket, taking a long gulp of Coke afterward.

There were a few cars in the parking lot, covered in droplets that slithered down panes of glass and sides of doors. A lamplight flickered as he passed it, and a large drop of water narrowly missed him as it made a suicidal leap from the top of the post. The soda fizzled and sloshed around inside the tin can.

In minutes, the can was drained, and so Shinji tossed it into a trash bin in the park as he passed. He idly shoved his hand into his pocket and continued strolling, finding the crumpled piece of paper reach his fingertips once more. Pulling it out, he observed it once again—there was writing on its reverse side that Shinji had missed the first time:

_--If you reach a standstill and don't know where to go, do something else. Inspiration can't be forced, but plot advancements can. Discipline is essential to getting anything done._

_--Don't plan anything. It ruins the surprise._

_--Plan everything. If you don't, your story becomes inconsistent and reeks of suck._

_--Balance planning with improvisational writing. There's always the DELETE key for abominations._

_--While it's not recommended to rely on dues ex machinas, the device can be warranted. If you do it, make sure it resembles a cartoonishly big red friendly button—that way the audience knows for sure that you're totally shitting them. Don't pretend it means anything significant, though._

_--Deconstructionism sucks._

Shinji still couldn't make sense of it, even after rereading the front of the scrap, so he folded it back up and returned it to the pocket with a sigh. Sometimes Kensuke was just plain weird.

What he hadn't quite realized was that his aimless wandering led him directly into Rei's district—something that, on a pseudo-subconscious level, he strongly desired. Consciously, he still repressed the fact that he was actually having sex with her. This fact gave him butterflies in his stomach and scared him shitless at the same time.

Four flights of stairs, fifteen puddles, and only one stubbed toe later, Shinji gently brought his knuckles against the cold metal of the apartment door. He shivered at the feel of the drizzle against his bare arms; wind blew in the droplets from the open windows above his head.

He thought about what he was doing as he waited for the door to open up. He thought about Asuka and what she would say if she ever found out, and about Misato's teasing. He also thought about what his father would do if he ever found out—though that train of thought was contradicted by another train of thought that suggested his father _already _knew, as he was responsible for the Section-2 reports, and that the utterly non-existent communication between the two of them implied his father's grim approval of the situation.

The door opened slowly and creaked loudly, blowing up his station of deliberation. It revealed pale thighs and a button down white shirt. He smiled a little, warming a fraction at the sight.

She stood there motionlessly, and staring deep into her eyes reminded him of a moon reflected off a red sea. And even though he knew otherwise, for a little while, it felt like everything was OK.


	4. Calling Mister Oswald

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Neon Genesis: Evangelion_.

**Author's Note:** Chapter title from "Less Than Zero", by Elvis Costello.

My thanks to you reviewers! This is probably the weakest chapter of the story simply due to its overabundance of dialogue. I liked writing it anyway, and it does have a place in the overall work, but I think it functions best as a dividing line. Next chapter is where things start getting really weird. **Violet Shadows**, tone & mood are probably the things I put the most value on when writing. Atmosphere is a very important aspect of ANY style of expression that many folks tend to overlook. **NemesisZero**, meta-ness indeed! **Kknd2**, there certainly IS something taking shape here! Thanks again!

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**Nightlife 3.0: Calling Mister Oswald With the Swastika Tattoo**

The television flickered uselessly into the lonely apartment. She couldn't bring herself to really focus on what was happening on screen—the events of the day were still too freshly burned in her brain. Outside, a cool breeze disrupted the unbearably humid air of a perpetual summer, and dark clouds hung in the sky like harbingers of some unnamed catastrophe.

"Stupid," Maya breathed, back against the foot of the couch, knees curled up to her chest, eyes red and irritated. "So stupid."

The television flashed vaguely pornographic images of actors barking unintelligible gibberish: "Sync ratio dropping—the entry plug isn't accepting reject signals!"

A familiar figure with dyed blonde hair shouted at the screen. "If he keeps going like this, terminal exhaustion will breach the absolute distress boundary!"

"Shinji! Pull out!" The Major in the red jacket barked. "Maximum ejaculation isn't permitted! Certainty of successful impregnation is invalid! Rei can't handle the fatigue—"

Maya, pillow resting against her knees, stared forlornly out the sliding glass door that emptied onto the concrete patio. The single light on the porch was yellow, and though it was night, she still felt like a downpour was imminent.

The television panned up to reveal a crazed man. "No, let him be." He breathed a distorted fog of perfection though his very pores. His outline was hazy and ill-defined, and the camera couldn't get a good fix on him even as it zoomed in to catch a close-up. "Flax Hardseed commands it," he said.

It was a ping at the door that interrupted Maya from her despair. Setting her pillow aside, she blew her nose into a tissue and deposited it in the wastebasket by the couch before standing up and smoothing out the wrinkles in her uniform. She paused by the bathroom to debate whether washing her face was a worthwhile idea, but she relented when a second ping emanated into the abode.

The door slid open with a whish. She gazed at the newcomers tiredly.

"Guys, do you have any idea how late it is?"

"Ten thirty-eight—"

"—Tokyo-time."

Makoto Hyuga and Shigeru Aoba stood in her doorway, an elongated crate filled with bottles of various shapes and sizes stacked haphazardly inside. The bottle necks poked up like pins in a cushion. The guys grinned at her, but Makoto made a face as he noticed her somewhat disheveled state.

"Were you… are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she unintentionally sniffled and probably gave herself away.

"Right," Shigeru commented. "Come on, we've got loads of booze that we don't feel like trucking back down four flights of steps." She regarded him coldly. "What? We're leaving it here whether you want it or not—and once you see all the good stuff we got our hands on, you won't be able to help yourself."

"And drinking alone is the sign of an alcoholic," Makoto provided energetically. "You weren't sleeping, were you?"

She sighed, and let her features soften a little. Then she shook her head. "No, I wasn't. Come on in, I guess." She stepped back from the door, and the two guys stumbled inside, steps somewhat out of sync as they did their best to keep all the bottles from falling over the side of the crate. "You'll have to excuse the mess," she apologized. "I don't exactly have many people over here."

"I'm sure it's fine," Makoto dismissed.

"Can't be worse than this guy's," Shigeru cracked a smirk as he tilted his head in his cohort's direction.

"My place isn't that bad."

Shigeru grunted a chuckle but left his response at that. They sat the crate on one of the counters in the kitchen and started to unload some of the bottles. "Sure beats my first apartment," he mumbled, referring to the clean and orderly kitchen, as he hefted something with a label too faded to read.

Maya watched from the doorway as they pulled out bottle after bottle. "Where did you guys get all that alcohol?" She asked, somewhat impressed.

"Hah," Makoto barked. "We have our contacts that specialize in everything from the curious to the ordinary to the freakishly outlandish."

"Liquor store below my apartment closed down," Shigeru supplied. "I knew the owner, so when he cleaned out his back room, he offered this stuff to me for cheap."

"Spoilsport."

"Anyway, I had it all sitting in my apartment for the last day and a half—had a bottle of '83 J&B (think that's what it was) in there, but he and I drank that last night with—ah, shit, whatsizname from maintenance—" he snapped his fingers.

"Horaki." Makoto completed.

"Right, right, why do I always forget his family name?" Shigeru tilted his head in annoyance at his own lack of comprehension.

"Well I don't know what 'ninety-three jay and bee' means," Maya couldn't help but let herself grin at their antics as she interrupted the banter. "But how'd it taste?"

"Eight-three," Shigeru corrected.

"And it was awful," Makoto said. "Burned my throat, made my eyes leak acid. I thought this guy would cough his appendix out." He looked her in the eye. "It was great."

Shigeru conceded. "Sure was. Then I come into work this morning, see you zoning out before lunch even hits, not listening to the Major's briefing, neglecting one of the com panels, and next thing I know, you're a pin drop away from terminal waterworks a half hour before shift's over."

"Yeah, when I got to the garage I thought I saw—well, I don't really know, but it just looked like you were really depressed. The way you looked out your windshield…" he trailed off after he noticed Maya's uncomfortable shift and focused intently on the label-less bottle in his hands. "Uh, is this safe?" He suddenly asked Shigeru, who had just placed two bottles of sake beside a small collection of what could have been Irish whiskeys. "There's stuff floating around in it."

Shigeru shrugged absently. "Should be; that guy sold just about everything I'd never heard of before, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a few bottles of moonshine in here."

Makoto grimaced and put the bottle down beside a Jack Daniels.

"So anyway, we thought we'd stop by, see how you were doing." Shigeru finished. "I mean, you're definitely not a stranger—we've all gone out drinking a few times, after all."

"Once," Maya scoffed.

He raised an eyebrow as he set a bottle of brandy on the counter. "Once? No, more like three or four times—"

Makoto interrupted him. "Actually, one of those times it was with Kaji and Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki, and then another time it was just Fuyutsuki, and one of those times it was with that one girl with the curly red hair that works with Balthazar. Or maybe that was just me and her; I can't remember if you were with us or not."

Maya glanced at them suspiciously, running her fingers through her hair and massaging her scalp. "You guys go drinking with the Sub-Commander?"

Shigeru sniggered as he pulled another bottle out of the crate. "Yeah," he said. "The guy's real cool, really relaxed when he's off duty. He's pretty morbid and depressing in the things he talks about, but—"

"Relaxed? He's as stiff as a board."

"Well, compared to when he's on duty—and anyway, can you blame him? Weight of the world's on his shoulders, man! He'd be crazy _not_ to drink. Besides," he added, shrugging. "He mentioned something about having to continue socializing, kept him in touch with… I dunno, I can't remember what. He said it in that wistful, far-away type voice he uses whenever he recounts depressing stories while he's sloshed."

Maya chuckled. "Somehow I can't see the Sub-Commander getting sloshed, much less with you two."

"And just what is that supposed to mean?" Makoto scoffed indignantly. "Oh by the way, the Major said something about a party at her place Friday. You're invited, everybody's invited, actually, but you know how it is—there are some you just know won't show up. Like the Commander." He frowned and stared at a bottle. "I wonder what he does in his free time," he pondered aloud.

"Drink," Shigeru mumbled. "That's what I'd do in his position."

"And he probably thinks about his wife," Maya said.

"Wife—what?"

"He was married?"

"Yeah, didn't you know?" Maya walked over from the doorframe and looked over the multitude of bottles. "Something happened to her years ago, disappeared. That's part of the reason he's such a… well…"

"Such an asshole, I think is the word you're looking for."

"Actually, I was going to say 'lonely person'," Maya said sardonically as she picked up one of the sake bottles.

Shigeru rolled his eyes. Makoto started going through cabinets looking for glasses. "How do you know this, anyway?"

She shrugged. "Doctor Akagi tells me stuff when we're pulling all-nighters in the labs," she mumbled. Her face twitched when she said the name.

"Ha!" Shigeru spun to Makoto, putting his hand out. "I _knew_ it. Five bucks, now!"

"Wha—I—no way!" the man exclaimed, pulling his head out of one of the lower cabinets. "You can't hold me to a bet I made while I was drunk!"

"Damn right I can," Shigeru laughed, and in it there was an edge of sinister intent.

"And besides," Makoto continued, "her knowing about Ikari's wife isn't enough to prove she's _sleeping _with him. Could have just slipped out in personal conversation—"

"Oh, come on. Even Fuyutsuki's commented that the man's more guarded than the Vatican."

"Ah, shit. I was hoping you'd forgotten that," came the muffled response from the cabinet.

"No way, pal. Now pay up, a bet's a bet—"

"Ah hah, found some!" Makoto's face emerged, and in his hands were three short glasses.

The bet seemingly forgotten, Shigeru's eyes lit up and he grabbed a few bottles at random. "Alright! Where's a good place to relax?" He asked Maya.

"Uh—" she stepped back a little bit, a reddish tinge brush-stroking across her cheeks. "Well, the living room's a little cluttered with stuff since I wasn't really _expecting anyone—whereareyougo—?_" Her voice increased in urgency as Makoto disappeared through the doorway, turning left down the short hallway.

"Wow," he said from the next room, Maya's hasty retreat from the kitchen leaving Shigeru holding a bottle of cognac, something unlabeled, and one of the sakes. "You sure have a lot of nineteen-eighties music." For good measure, he decided to grab one of the Irish whiskeys and snuggled it in the crook of his left arm.

"Don't touch any of that," Maya cried as Shigeru entered the room.

"What? I didn't touch anyth—oh man! You actually _have_ a hard copy of this?" Makoto stared intently at one of the CD spines on the shelf. "That's been out of print for decades! One of the old timers on my floor saw this guy live back in the day—apparently there were plans to rerelease this thing before the Impact, but…" he trailed off and shrugged.

Maya looked a little sheepish as she herded him towards the couch. "I don't know what the big deal's about," she said. "_Fear_ has better songs anyway—the only cuts of any value on _Slow Dazzle_ were tracks nine and ten. His cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' was okay, I guess."

"What are you guys talking about?" Shigeru grunted, amused. He sat the bottles down on the plain wood coffee table in front of the couch, taking the time to clear away a few pieces of paper and three different stacks of novels. "Little behind on your reading?"

"Nothing," she replied. "And yeah, a little. It's all dumb stuff, though…"

Makoto sneaked a glance at the spines after setting down the glasses. "Kierkegaard… Mercedes Lackey? Baudrillard? …Bret Ellis?—jezus, Pynchon?—Nick Sparks?" Everything was a question. "A little eclectic, eh?"

Shigeru cracked a grin. "Ever read _American Psycho_?"

Maya shook her head. "No, all I've got is _Less than Zero_. It's hard to get a lot of this stuff since it's all been out of print for so long. And the libraries don't tend to carry… well…" She blushed.

"I gotta admit, I never woulda pegged you as a fan of Ellis' stuff." Makoto mused as he opened the whiskey. "Sparks I could see coming, though."

"Yeah… Ellis is one of my guilty things," she mumbled, watching him pour the drinks as she sat down on the carpet. "I usually read it to take my mind off things… his writing is really cathartic."

"I know what you mean. His stuff reminds me of all those pre-Impact memories—the few I have, anyway." Shigeru sat so his back leaned against the foot of the couch. "It's funny how your perspective changes as you get older. I always used to think that things were so much better then, but looking at it now, they really weren't."

Maya took the glass offered by Makoto's extended hand. "How so?"

"My family was lower middle class," he said simply. "The Impact hit, economies went through the tubes—yeah, I lost my folks a few years after the waters rose, and I went hungry for ages like everyone else did …. But where I had once been looking at a long hard career in car mechanics—something I didn't like anyway—I suddenly had a decent shot at college." He shrugged, took a drink, cleared his throat. "Now look at where I'm at—I'm defending the world against invaders, and I'm making more money than I'd ever seen in my childhood."

"So that's all you care about?" Maya's eyebrows were in her hairline, and Makoto smirked as Shigeru replied.

"Of course not! There's music—a-and this!" He waved his arms about.

Maya was deadpan. "Booze."

"Well—yeah—but I also meant the companionship. The 'us' here. What's going on right now." He clarified.

"To camaraderie," Makoto interjected with a drink, not bothering to see if the other two had raised their glasses.

They were silent for a few minutes. The television's meanderings broke through the gloom, and the wind picked up outside.

"Excavation of the labial context complete," a voice from the TV called. "Bio-units are currently undergoing repairs to cellular walls and abdominal tissues. Estimated time to completion: six hours, three minutes."

"What the—wait, is this… ah… whatsitcalled." Makoto frowned at the TV.

"Evangelion," Shigeru provided. "First aired way back; the station must have just gotten syndication rights for it. I've got the whole series on tape at my place."

"Yeah," Makoto assented, taking another drink. "That's it."

"Why not laserdisc?" Maya asked.

"Huh?"

"Why have you got it on tape?"

"Oh," Shigeru let out a laugh and nodded. "Yeah, I got my tapes from a guy I knew in college, and he'd had them since before the Impact. I don't know if the show ever made it to laserdisc. I don't even know if the studio survived."

Maya sounded a note of understanding and returned her blank gaze to the television.

"It's funny, actually." Shigeru commented. "I don't remember the show looking quite like this. I don't remember that—that guy, the fuzzy one that's out of focus. The rest of the show actually mimics what _we_ do."

"Maybe they gave it the Lucas treatment," Makoto yawned.

Time passed and the television burbled its nonsense of sync ratios and garbled geometric fields—Fabreiza: get those darn blood stains out of your clothing faster than you can power up—mornings are now in Da BAG—white light punctuated by sine waves of electromagnetism—stop dead Maya on the tube vision crying then—empty bottle tossed to the ground—laughs woke a tenant up—drowning static fed on the lion's skull—wish you were here—rainbow drowning noise inside the head of what's to be—prophetic sounds of epiphany—little boy on screen cry baby cry baby go to sleep now—heavy thump bass beat from windows—drop drop dribble splat—red in the eyes and flushed in the skin—"ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha"—are these from the teeth of mechanical raptors or faceless automatons?—went to work earlier today and stared at a computer screen—finding the edges get slightly fuzzed out—pleasant numbness not equal to quadrilateral sensory override—"Coffee?"—got stuck at red light that afternoon and nobody left—thunk, ow—toss a bitter loaf to whine or dine—that's fine—gonna regret it in the morning anyway.

"Have you thought that we're just… that we aren't really in control of our lives?"

"Shig, you're slurring your words together."

"Mak, you're slurring your… hearing. Together. Wait."

"What?"

"You mean like fate?"

"I mean like… like… hmm…"

"Hmm…"

"I don't get it."

"Neither do I."

"I mean like we're illusions built upon fantasies, I guess is what I'm uh… saying."

"Huh?"

"I mean like we're just little nothings built upon more nothing, and that our existences… that our… our existences mean nothing as well. Uh… And that we're sort of nothing because we mean nothing, and that we mean nothing because… we're nothing anyway."

"I think I see where you're going with this…"

"Shig, that makes no sense."

"We pilot fourteen-year-olds watch giant… wait… giant robot… things; we watch them pilot robot… giant… um… I'm not sure if this needs to make sense."

"You're drunk."

"I'm very drunk."

"Can we crash on your floor for the night?"

"…Yeah. Okay."

Does it make the pain go away? Are you better now, with your spoonful of cough syrup prescribed by your doctors? Do you feel warm inside because you drank so damn much? Or is it because of the other two bodies you have laying on your apartment floor?

Maya gazed at the ceiling. "Everything feels different somehow."

"Don't tell me you've never been drunk," Makoto mumbled from the floor, balancing an empty bottle on his forehead.

"No, not that, I mean, different. Like…"

"Like everything means nothing, because we are nothing." Shigeru smirked at something as he said this.

Makoto chuckled, but it quickly lapsed into uncontrolled laughter. The bottle fell off his head.

Maya shook her head. "No, no, no—can't you feel it? Like, it's… different."

"I feel warm and sleepy and just a little crazy," Makoto said.

"I feel numb," Shigeru provided.

She was about to respond, but the television abruptly flickered into nothingness, and the apartment lapsed into darkness.


	5. Put A Fist Through Your Steel Plate Door

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Neon Genesis: Evangelion_.

**Author's Note:** Chapter title is a line from The Rolling Stones' "Midnight Rambler".

Thanks to my reviewers! **Violet Shadows**, Dada kicks ass. **Nemesis Zero**, definitely. The bridge techs always reminded me of the crew that was left out in the rain while the storm went down--kinda like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, except not QUITE as cruelly & absurdly manipulated. **Fresh C**, ah hah! I'm glad someone noticed the characterization. There's a reason they're somewhat off-kilter from their "normal" characterizations that comes around in chapter 6/7, so hold in there.

* * *

**Nightlife 2.1: I'll Put A Fist Through Your Steel-Plate Door**

Shinji groaned and collapsed, burying his face into the sweat-soaked pillow. His breath tickled her ear. Her body was breathing heavily beneath his, straining against the lone restraint above his head. There was a peace here, a serenity that existed only in this moment—pure exhaustion mixed with an ennui that bordered on unconsciousness. He could feel the haze in his muscles, and for a moment, as he wrapped his arms around her body, it felt like they were nothing more than embryos nestled in a womb.

When their winds returned, Shinji pushed off the mattress with the palms of his hands, immediately missing the heat of her body as his naked chest rose into the air.

She moaned softly as he looked down at her gorgeous, tired face. The jerk of her forearms reminded him of the handcuffs.

"Oh shit," he breathed quickly, reaching for the key on the nightstand. "I'm so sorry, Rei." His hands shook as he tried to get the goddamn keyhole to line up. One side came open with soft click, and after a moment of quiet cursing, the other gave way as well.

Rei rubbed her wrists after they were free. There were deep indentations in the flesh that were bruising slightly.

"D-doesn't that hurt?" He asked her, watching her massage the marks as he sat on the side of the bed.

"It does," she said quietly. "But the effect is most admirable."

"Admirable," Shinji echoed. He ran his hands through his hair and stared at the way his bare feet made contact with the cold linoleum.

She peered at him. "Is something wrong?"

"Uh—no, nothing." He got up quickly and started for the shower. "I'm going to go wash up," he said, doing his best not to look back.

Her eyes followed him, but she said nothing. Sliding her pale legs across the cotton sheets, Rei gathered herself and stood to follow Shinji into the bathroom.

Water cascaded out of the showerhead with a sharp hiss that cut through the empty air like a million razorblades through tinfoil. Droplets spattered about the stall, but it wasn't a pleasant mist.

Rei nudged him on the shoulder and wordlessly passed him, her nakedness like a tombstone. He heard her gasp as the water hit her skin, but she visibly relaxed underneath the showerhead.

"Weren't you going to wash up?" She asked, lathering a glop of shampoo in her hands.

"There—uh—there's not enough room…" he knew _that_ was a lie from experience. It was a pathetic excuse he used to remain in his perpetual angst.

She eyed him as she massaged the suds into her scalp, but said nothing. The suds flowed and traced lines in her back as water cascaded through her hair. Abstractions whirled across the pallor of her lithe body. If it had been anyone else, any_where_ else, it could have been beautiful.

He watched her shower, and when she was done, she grabbed one of the two towels hanging over the sink to dry herself with. Water continued to pound the dingy surfaces. Steam was thick and the moisture penetrated the pores in his skin even as he sweated.

She gazed at him as she used the towel to ruffle her hair.

Minutes later, he finished his shower and exited the bathroom in time to see Rei pouring tea. She was dressed simply in a button-down shirt and underwear. Shinji felt no need to overdress either, so he opted for his slacks. He still felt a little uncomfortable without his shirt on, but Rei didn't seem to mind, so he did his best to swallow his self-consciousness and sat down at the table.

"You're distracted," she practically whispered. She sat the awkwardly-shaped metal cup in front of him before sitting down in the opposite chair. Steam wafted off the rims of the cups like smoke from a smoldering wreckage.

"It…it's nothing," he replied uncertainly. The cup was too tarnished to see his reflection in. Only the amber-green of the tea offered him his face, distorted by ripples caused by the vibrations of his heartbeat.

After a few minutes of stewing under her gaze, Shinji relented. "It's Asuka," he finally mumbled. "She's… getting… bolder, I guess. I don't know. If it were anyone else, I'd think she was trying to flirt with me, but she's just…" He sighed and shivered and continued to stare intently at his cup.

Rei said nothing. She brought her cup to her lips and sipped. Her face was a sunset behind the haze of a pyrrhic victory.

"She's gotten more unstable," he admitted. "All she does is _hate_, _over_ and _over_. She's never been all that fun to be around, but lately it's like her only goal is to make me feel worse than I already _do_. Ever since the twelfth angel, that's all she does. It grates on my nerves like nothing I know."

"All she wants is attention," Rei responded.

"That's all she _gets_!" Shinji waved his hands wildly, his voice rising in volume only slightly. "She gets it from everyone! The people at school crowd around her like she's some kind of idol! Her sync scores always draw appreciation from the people at NERV! The maintenance crew?—I heard that half of the maintenance crew even got a hold of snapshots Kensuke took from when he sneaked into the girls' locker room!" He sighed and collected himself, babbling as he did so. "He hid in the air ducts during the gym period and Toji had to cover for him. He waited there the whole period just to get about a dozen shots of Asuka changing. He doesn't even _like_ Asuka. He did it all on a bet with Toji."

He sighed again, and suddenly his wind was back. "And that's another thing, too! Even the people that don't _like_ her give her attention! Half of my conversations at school descend into pointless banters with those two about what the hell Asuka's whole problem is! And she just fuels their bickering by yelling louder!"

Shinji raised the cup to his lips, but didn't drink. Instead, he set it down again and continued. "She's worse than Misato. She parades around the apartment with next to nothing on and then berates me for 'leering' at her—and all I'm doing is my homework! Or watching TV! Or—or—just _not_ looking at her! I-I mean, she just goes off, and then she calls me a stupid little boy for not returning these asinine teasing flirts she does." His fingers threaded through his hair, tracing white lines in his scalp. The reflection he saw in the tea was that of a hollow and pitted skull covered in sallow flesh. "It makes me _sick_."

Rei continued to gaze at him wordlessly. She sipped more of her tea and waited for him to continue.

"And… and just everything else, I guess." Shinji had deflated, but his angst remained. "Everyone at NERV's been acting differently since the twelfth. I know they try to hide it, but I can see it in the way they act around me—it's like… I don't really know what it's like, I just know that they're… it's like they fear something. It's like they fear me. They fear something in Eva, something that I'm supposed to have control over. But the truth is—the truth is that I don't control it at_ all_." He gripped the metal cup in his right hand, but smacked the table with the fist of his left. "Every time—_every time_—I fail! Every goddamn time! And then Evangelion—whatever it is—it works, it does all the work, and I don't even have the chance to—to—to—"

He sighed dejectedly and finally took a sip of the tea. "…This is good, Rei," he said quietly.

Rei's face colored slightly, and she averted her eyes. "Thank you."

Shinji's phone vibrated against his thigh, and he had to shift in the chair in order to retrieve the device from his pocket.

"Hello?" He cast a quick glance at Rei, who was merely staring vacantly at the pot of tea. "No, I'm out. You what? You do it. I _can't_ do it; I'm not at the apartment. I told you I'm not—I said—yeah. Well I guess you'll just have to do it yourself, then. Fine. Nothing! I'm not with—it's not like that. Goodbye." He clapped the phone shut and dropped it on the metal table and propped his head on his forearms.

"I wish I could stay here forever," he mumbled. "I wish I didn't have to worry about anything."

"I… do not know kind of response you're looking for," Rei started.

Shinji looked up, focusing on the pale face beyond the ridge of the metal cup. "What?"

"Life is pain," she said. "If you cannot bring yourself to accept the nothingness in death, then you must continue to endure the suffering of life."

"Mister Kaji said the same thing," Shinji groaned. "But he said that it didn't have to be that way. He said life didn't have to be full of misery and suffering, and that we made this… well, he said it a lot better than I ever could. 'Wrought our fate with our own bare hands' or something, he said. I can't remember exactly."

"Do you really believe that?"

"Huh?" Shinji leaned back in his chair. "What—well—I mean, I guess. But looking at it that way is just as bad! That's just saying that we're all just victims of forces beyond our control!"

Rei got up and approached the tea pot. "Some of us are." She poured herself another cupful of the fluid. The pot hit the countertop with a dull clang. "What did your father say to you?"

The image of the grave-less memorials hit his brain, and he remembered his father's words and the smell of the dry air and the heat of the V-TOL's engines as it kicked up sand.

"He told me to stop looking for him," Shinji said. He sipped more tea. The light of the moon cast a long shadow of the bed that crept slowly towards the kitchen. Bandages were stacked neatly on the corner of a table. Even the skyline seemed vacant, though lights still shimmered in the darkness.

Rei turned from the counter to look at his face. He drank the rest of the tea in his cup and stood from the table, taking his time to push in the chair and trying to ignore the obnoxious grating sound that resulted. Doing his best to ignore her gaze, he stepped back into the bedroom and retrieved his S-DAT, along with his shirt. He sat on the bed to put his socks on.

"You're not staying tonight?" Rei asked from the kitchen. She didn't raise her voice.

Shinji faltered as his arm missed the sleeve. "N-no," he stuttered. "I—ah, Mister Kaji said he had something for me to do tonight. He wanted to pick me up at seven, but I—well I—I told him I had errands. So he insisted on eleven." He glanced quickly at the dim clock on the table next to the bandages: 10:54.

"It takes twenty minutes to walk to the Major's apartment," she observed. Her metal cup made a sharp clack as she set it on the counter.

He faced the window as he tucked in his shirt and looked down at his S-DAT. "Yeah. He's—ah—picking me up… here."

Rei remained by the counter.

As he made his way toward the door, Shinji tried again to ignore her gaze. This time he failed, and he paused by the foyer to look back at her. Her stare wasn't cold or emotionless or dead.

"Rei, why don't you smile more?"

It was warm, and Shinji felt like he had just watched a sapphire tumble into a cement mixer.

On the curb, he met the sound of Kaji's convertible with an itchy scalp. His hair was still wet from the shower as he clamored into the passenger's seat. The only working florescent light flickered above the pair, and if it weren't for the apartment complexes' lights, the rest of the street would have been bathed in darkness for a few short seconds. _Let It Bleed_ ran circles around itself in the car's stereo; the music was quiet, but the bluesy tunes added an even darker ambience to the already forlorn despondency.

"A little late to be taking showers at young women's apartments, wouldn't you say?" Kaji lit a cigarette as Shinji buckled a seatbelt. He looked at the clock on the dash and stuffed the lighter in his shirt pocket once the tip started to glow. "Or a little early, depending on the context."

Shinji blushed. "It's not like that," he mumbled halfheartedly.

Kaji peered at him with an eyebrow raised, that casual half-smirk tugging at an underlying hilarity only he could see. "None of my business, I suppose." He kicked the engine into gear and the car took off down the desolate street. The lone streetlamp wavered and flickered and questioned the meaning of its existence as it bit at the edges of night.

"Uh, Mister Kaji," Shinji started after a few minutes of rushing wind and Rolling Stones. "Where are we going?"

Kaji took a corner at twenty, drifting around with a steady grip on the handbrake. His cigarette flew out of his mouth as he forced the beast up to sixty on a relatively short stretch of road, and Shinji's grip on the door handle increased exponentially.

Wordless seconds slipped discretely into minutes bathed in silence; the whistle of the wind and the roar of the engine were the only witnesses to their escape.

They rounded a bend and the roadway took on a reasonable incline. Minutes later, they were perched on the same vantage point Misato had taken him to upon his first arrival to Tokyo-3. Kaji pulled the parking brake and cut the engine, leaving the stereo on to perpetuate its tunes.

"Everything I am about to tell you is a joke," Kaji said, after the track changed over to what would have been the second side of the album. "Don't take it seriously."

Shinji looked at the driver somewhat skeptically. A red dot on the corner of a skyscraper blinked in slow monotony, fading in and out with the sound of the tide far below.

"We have reached the time after miracles, Shinji." The man's voice was tired and cold and stained with an indefinable heaviness that permeated his physical body. "And I have gazed upon the face of its prophet." He reached into his pockets to retrieve his cigarettes and lighter once more.

After lighting a stick, he continued: "Have you ever lain awake at night and wondered why you could hear the Smashing Pumpkins or Depeche Mode without your S-DAT on? Or why you periodically have gaps in your memory? Or why it sometimes seems like hours have been crammed into the space of just a few minutes?" Kaji's cigarette was a dim crimson glow—a period in the darkness. "Have you ever felt eyes on the back of your neck, only to find that there's nobody around?"

Shinji stared in mute fascination as Kaji's ramblings descended into a tone resembling emotional vulnerability. "Shinji," he said. "Haven't you ever wondered why you can never remember falling asleep or waking up?"

"What do you mean?" His voice wavered, but Shinji was able to finish the question without stuttering.

"There is a device in NERV," the smoking man started. "It rests below Terminal Dogma—beneath the white giant on her cross, in the very bowels of the installation, in a place so deep I doubt even the Sub-Commander is aware of its presence." Kaji took a breath. "It lies at the heart of existence, where it is so cold that it chills the very marrow of bones."

He coughed, and Shinji blinked, involuntarily gasping as he did so. Shinji wasn't even aware that his arm had gone to sleep because of how it hung over the side of the door.

"They use it to travel through time," Kaji hissed, his voice going weak and turning to a rasp. "They're harvesting the _future_, Shinji. They're taking parts of Instrumentality and applying it to the current predicament, fragmenting the very core of reality and forcing multiple subjective identities to bear the weight of an entirely objective existence. They're forcing an entire ontological crisis upon the subconscious minds of people who simply aren't ready to cope with that kind of thing."

Shinji gaped, unsure of what to do or think. Kaji was saying things that made absolutely **no sense**.

"I'm telling you this because you need to know," Kaji whispered, the night's gloom descending and permeating like a damp fog. "I'm telling you this because I'm going to be dead _very_ soon. They—" he sighed and tossed his cigarette butt off the ridge, taking the time to fish another stick out of the box in his pocket and lighting it with a flick of his lighter.

"When I was down there, in the void," he began again, "I came across the scrolls. They weren't anything I had expected—weren't even parchment, or lambskin, or anything like that at all. It was just a folded wad of computer paper, haphazardly stapled and clipped. You know what they said?"

Shinji shook his head slowly.

"Kaji Ryoji dies in Episode Twenty-One," he mumbled. "The scripts were a little over twelve years old, but that seemed so inconsequential." Kaji slumped and breathed heavily. "You ended the world, Shinji. You fundamentally altered everything everybody ever knew or thought or perceived. The world died, and you gave it a rebirth with your own two hands. This stuff isn't _scheduled_ or _prophesized_, Shinji, it's already happened. We're experiencing a rerun of a television show—it's all regurgitated syndication, and all this time we've been entirely unaware."

He wiped his forehead, and beige coloring came off like makeup. Shinji watched with something akin to repulsion and amazement as Kaji looked at him. The pigmentation on his forehead was uneven and cracked, like the icing of a cake left out in the sun. Beneath the folded layers was a fleshy knot—a scar.

"We've been edited, cut, censored, placed out of order, watched backwards, rewound, fast forwarded, skipped completely, dubbed, subtitled, redubbed, erroneously understood, played backwards for subliminal messages, and misinterpreted more times than can be counted. There are entire piles of unused or defunct scripts lying around in that basement of existence—a literary graveyard of dead plots and anonymous characters that never existed. There have been an infinite number of Kaji Ryojis and Shinji Ikaris all reprising the same fundamental aspect of this reality, and each of them is equally valid as the _true_ Kaji or the _true_ Shinji.

"I died in Episode Twenty-One," Kaji said softly. "And I have died in Episode Twenty-One ever since. But now—now that I know the truth of things, their schedule has kicked into high gear. This time—this time I'm not going to just _die_, Shinji. They're going to erase me from the scripts. They're going to remove me from existence. They're going to replace me with a different character, someone else who might look like Kaji Ryoji, and might even have the name 'Kaji Ryoji', and he might say things like I do, but he _won't be_ me."

He looked back over the glittering city.

"It's just a matter of time now," he said. "And there's nothing I can do about it."

Kaji sighed again and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. After a moment of silence, he straightened and kicked the engine into life. As the car backed onto the roadway, he spoke again.

"Reality is wounded, Shinji," he said. The transmission chunked and clunked as he put it in first gear, let up on the clutch and eased into the gas. "Have you ever paid attention to the television?"

Shinji, unsure as to whether he should be as baffled as he actually was, shook his head. "Not really."

"Right," Kaji agreed. "It's always on in the background, blinking its nonsense and noise into the ambience." He cleared his throat as he shifted gears and sped through an intersection. "Well, next time you see one, I want you to pay attention to the television."

"Asuka watches it sometimes," Shinji divulged. A billboard flew past, and it was an advertisement for orange juice. The woman holding the fake carton was pale and her smile was as meaningless as the pedestal she was mounted on. "She's always watching the same show—nothing but cartoons fighting and… well… I can't understand what's going on."

"Until recently, it's the only show that's ever been airing." Kaji shrugged. The engine roared. "Now there's a competitor—it hasn't got a name, but it closely parallels real life."

"A reality TV-show?" Shinji raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Mister Kaji—"

"It's not a reality TV-show, Shinji. It's a TV-show modeled on reality—there's no way any television studio on the planet could have access to the things they're showing and revealing about NERV and the Second Impact—that's clearance information even _Katsuragi_ doesn't have. Granted, there's always the possibility that they came up with the whole plot by chance—_Hamlet_ and monkeys style—but that's pretty goddamn unlikely."

They sped through an intersection where the stoplights all blinked yellow.

"That show is the wound I'm referring to," Kaji said. "It's like it's modeled on our reality, but it's some sort of deranged mutation of a bizarre perspective—like a, a, a combat simulation that's had its data become corrupted by some kind of virus." He stuttered for the proper analogy. "And that TV show, that's what it is; it simulates this place, provides an escape from the harsh realities we have to encounter—but it's so sick and depraved that it lost its whole context to an infectious character trope who hijacked the plot. Now he's driving it into the ground, but for some reason, our very existences are inexorably linked to the fate of that show."

Shinji honestly didn't know what to say to any of this, so he simply sunk further into the seat cushions and waited to be dropped off. Minutes phased into each other, and soon Shinji found himself standing on the curb, closing the door of Kaji's convertible, murmuring a half-assed good night.

"Shinji," Kaji called after the boy had already backed away a few steps. "Remember this conversation," he said. "Don't ever forget what I said to you tonight. I won't be who I am right now the next time we meet."

Shinji rubbed his temples and closed his eyes, nodding, ignoring, waving goodbye as he started for the apartment building. He heard the car's engine kick into a roar as the beast sped on away into the night.

The stairs were grimy and desolate, each footfall echoing emptily into the dark of night. As he reached the apartment, his phone rang again.

"Hello?" He answered wearily, tapping in the lock combination on the keypad. The door slid open with a swoosh. "No, I just go in. I'm sorry. It's just—I—no, I'll probably do it tomorrow morning. No I _wasn't_ out with—no!—I didn't do anything, I swear!" His shoes thumped into the wall as he kicked them off by the doorway. "You want to what? How should I know? Did you—you did? Oh. Well then I guess you'll just have to ask her tomorrow. I don't know." He sighed as he shuffled into the kitchen and had to turn on the light. "I'm not going to do that. I don't even own a camera." He poured himself a glass of water and stared glumly at the reflection rippling on the surface.

The light in the living room was on, and the television spat out angry music accompanied by brief flashes of unintelligible lettering. Shinji briefly caught a glimpse of Asuka as he turned from the sink, but he blocked the image with the wall as he sat down, suddenly uncomfortable.

"I haven't done anything like that." He took a long drink from this glass. "I'm still here. I was taking a drink. Huh? Water. No, that stuff tastes awful." He really felt like hanging up. "No, I'm just tired. Don't you know how late it is?" He heard the television spout out sounds of violence from the other room. "Okay. I guess I'll see you in class then."

He hung up and drank more water, trying to plan a way to get into his room without being noticed by Asuka. She was supposed to be at Hikari's, but Shinji didn't feel like going through the effort of confronting her with this truth.

"Where were you?" Her voice cut through his thoughts like a guillotine.

"Uh—I was out with Kaji," he supplied unsteadily. He gripped the glass a little tighter and felt shaky as he rose from the chair.

She was silent for a little while, but her voice carried into the kitchen after a minute. "It's after midnight."

He glanced at the clock on the microwave. 12:22.

He couldn't think of anything to say.

"You were with her again tonight, weren't you?"

He cringed and dumped the rest of his glass into the sink. 12:23.

"Asuka…"

She was in the doorway. "Don't lie to me. I can smell her all over you."

"B-but I took a shower—"

"So you _admit_ it?! God—it's bad enough I have to live with _Misato_, but even _you_—"

12:24.

"Asuka—"

Lou Reed and Jackson Pollock oozed out of the television, interspersed with seemingly random combinations of Walt Disney, Michael Gira, and Dan Rathers. It flickered and vomited and chortled into an empty room.

12:25.

"I don't care what you do," Asuka seethed. "I don't care where you go. I don't care who you're with. I don't care about anything you do, because I don't care about _you_." She looked him dead in the eye as she enunciated the last syllable, then she strode out the kitchen and slammed the door to her room. He could hear her scream, even though she probably used her pillow to muffle it. A few things sounded like they broke when they hit the floor. Shinji winced with every unseen impact.

"I… I don't understand you," he sighed.

On the television screen, a scene played with characters like pieces on a Shogi board, dropping plot devices into the middle of plays, capturing important information for the audience, sliding around vague personalities for further development.

Shinji reached over and turned off the lamp light, picking the remote up off the floor. As his finger closed in on the power button, he paused just long enough to pay attention to whatever it was Asuka had been watching.

"But sir, the sequential impregnation drive is unusable!" A woman with purple hair shot her gaze up a steeply-inclined structure. "Rei wouldn't be able to handle the stress!"

"Do it." The responder was a pale persona whose image was blurry. His eyes were bloodshot and her expression crazed, though its voice was colder than the arctic storms.

"We can't—"

"Do it, otherwise we'll never see the end of it!" The grey old man beside the unfocused character urgently called. "We need to see this through—there's no telling what could happen if we don't!"

Shinji gazed dispassionately at the screen as it flickered its nonsense. "Weird," he mumbled, finally bringing his finger down and letting the television zap into silence and void.

He made his way into his room in the dimness, fumbling with his clothing before lying down. The clock next to his bed spat out an angry set of numbers, but he paid them little heed as he waited for unconsciousness to claim him.


	6. They're Making the Last Film

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Neon Genesis: Evangelion.

**Author's Note: **Chapter title is a line from "Death of the West", by Death In June.

Thanks to my reviewers! Only one more chapter after this one, so hang in there!

**Violet Shadows**, bwuahahaha! Just you wait! **Fresh C**, it's all part of the mystery… Though I'm sure these following chapters will help clear up a few things. **Kknd2**, wow! You're on par with quite a bit of your exposition, but remember that Kaji is himself a little unhinged in that last chapter. No doubt even _he's_ confusing himself with his metaphysical attempts at self-realization—but the bigger problem becomes exactly _how_ much of Kaji's little speech be trusted? Ha, more on that later (by "later" I mean this chapter & the next). Is Shinji truly the master of reality?

Reviews like these really make me happy!

EDIT: for some reason the section divisions disappeared. I think I've fixed it now, though.

EDIT 05/02/2010: looks like this site has a vendetta against my formatting. I've tried this again, and everything is looking stable. In another six months I expect these site-mandated divisionary eyesores to disappear YET AGAIN, however, forcing me to YET AGAIN reformat this damn thing.

* * *

**Tangent 2.0: They're Making the Last Film, They Say It's the Best**

* * *

"_You said so yourself—we're simply hypothetical realities that exist solely for the entertainment purposes of hyperdimensional beings." Gendo finished the statement. _

"_It's arrogant to assume that we create alternate realities through fiction," the man said. "These realities already exist, just as yours existed prior to the airing of the television show back in the nineties—just as mine existed prior to the drafting of this story in mid winter of 'oh nine—surely, also, just as the writer of this story has a reality of his own that has existed for just as long a time." He took a breath and pointed at the monitors behind him. "We're all aware of these different realities. We all understand their nature as incomprehensible entities that can only be rationalized through abstract methods. This is the whole gig behind artistry to begin with. You could almost say that our very emotions are built off of this—tied into our counterparts across realities, and even across identities within the realities we inhabit. I doubt that's quite what Jung was going with when he put his whole 'collective unconscious' into words, but I guess it's close."_

_Kaji rubbed his chin. "It almost sounds like you're talking about a holographic universe."_

"_I suppose in the grand scheme of things, yes. We're only information, after all. What we perceive to be causality is merely an illusion caused by our inability to consciously perceive that dimension which governs us. Matter and energy are simply… byproducts of this. Information cascades through the dimensions like water—matter and energy are simply the easiest manifestations that information takes along its route." The man laughed. "Are matter and energy simply rationalizations that we have come up with to describe information? Or is it that information rationalized itself within these realities as being matter and energy? If that's the case, then hell, we're simply living manifestations of information itself, rationalized as self-aware entities whose arrogance propels us to believe ourselves capable of rationalizing our world. Is information even self-aware? Are we even self-aware?" He laughed harder as he continued, descending into a fit of painfully misplaced humor. "Or—or is that just an illusion as well?"_

"_Water cascading through a layered reality," Kaji began. "So our singular entities aren't so unique after all…"_

"_I'm sorry?" The man sniffled and panted, wiping his brow with his sleeve. He sat back in the chair and observed him._

"_Your assertion of an informational cascade implies that these multiple universes all exist within a single reality. The analogy you used also implies that these universes are layered. Would this then mean that our singular existences manifest themselves as pluralistic constructs within these separate but interwoven causalities?"_

_The man frowned as the considered the statement. "Yes, I suppose it would. I'd almost call it symmetrical—a crystalline existence based on the perpetuation of some kind of vast and infinite golden ratio." He sighed and gestured to the monitors. "I suppose calling it 'crystalline' is a little unfair, considering how damaged and flawed it is."_

* * *

Shinji sighed and opened his eyes. It was night, and the GeoFront glowed with the unexplainable warmth of the womb. John Coltrane recordings played softly over the loudspeakers in the ceiling, and the hum of various mechanical systems threatened to drown out his saxophone.

He rubbed his face and looked through the windows that lined this particular break hovel—little more than a few benches and vending machines indented into a hallway that spanned this side of the building. The metal bench dug into his back uncomfortably. A train glided into a station far below, and the lights in its windows reflected off the surface of the subterranean pool as it arced toward its destination.

Someone kicked the sole of his shoe, and he looked up. A camera crew stood expectantly, but no one noticed them.

Shinji yawned. He stretched and stood up and cracked his back, then he walked over to the windows and resumed his survey of the scenery. The camera's fisheye lens caught him in profile as he leaned forward on metal the railing.

He caught hint of the shampoo in her hair as she passed, sighed loudly, and rested her forearms on the railing directly to his right. He didn't move, and he did his best to keep his breaths quiet and his heartbeat quieter. She cleared her throat loudly and tucked a stray hair behind her ear, fidgeting with her fingers when they found themselves with nothing else to do.

"Misato said she had a few things to finish up on, so she'll be here soon," she muttered, looking down at the GeoFront. Shinji said nothing. She cleared her throat.

After another minute of silence and stillness, she backed away from the railing and wandered over to the vending machines. He still hadn't looked at her. The train far below started back toward the wall of the cavern.

"Akagi's apparently got a date tonight," she said. "It was pretty funny watching her apply her mascara using one of the computer monitors as a mirror. Misato was making fun of her the whole time." Shinji heard her rap her knuckles against the fronts of the machines, and they accompanied some beat that her shoes were softly driving against the linoleum.

"Oh, I hadn't noticed," he mumbled.

"Of course you didn't; she didn't start doing that until after you'd left." It could have been a chuckle, but it sounded more like an indignant snort to Shinji. "I think she might have torn one of her nylons, she looked pretty pissed when she left the lab and she didn't have any on. You should have seen that Ibuki woman staring at her 'sempai' as she left. It was priceless!"

Shinji closed his eyes as he felt his face warm. He could literally feel the camera picking away at his resolve. The crew stood by patiently, faces covered in determination.

The railing vibrated and her scent was back. A pale arm leaned against the cool metal pole, accompanied by a crooked elbow and a light-green short-sleeve shirt. The railing cut across her back and her breasts strained against cotton. He quickly looked back out at the GeoFront. The train was spiraling its way toward the surface.

He heard her open something in a bag, followed by a few crunches. "I swear, you're so boring sometimes."

He made a noncommittal sound. She sighed and continued munching. The camera continued to film. The train was gone.

* * *

"_Anywhere can be paradise, so long as you have the will to live."_

"I just want to see them, one more time."

ZzzzZZZzzzZIP

"—ust want to see them, one more time."

ZzzzZzZZZZZZzzzZIP

"I just want—"

STOP. EJECT. Fishing around all those unlabeled VHS tapes reminds you why you bought the series on DVD in the first place.

PLAY.

* * *

"Whah!" Shigeru Aoba suddenly flinched into wakefulness, taking a moment to steady his heartbeat before carefully looking around.

The computer terminal in front of him was well worn but operable, and the holoscreen projected in front of the bridge area looked like it had gotten an upgrade. A few things looked a little sharper than he remembered, and there seemed to be a much brighter atmosphere—but other than that, things looked like normal.

Maya Ibuki was asleep at her terminal, as was Makoto at his. Their heads moved in synchronization to the rhythm of their breathing. Shigeru found it difficult to get the background fuzz from the nap out of his system, and absently noted that it would probably be another twenty minutes before his brain was back on track.

After a few minutes of zoning out, Shigeru Aoba noted another interesting fact about the bridge: the predominant sound—usually, from what he remembered, being a combination of the air conditioning system and the electronics—was the sound of various snores. He took a moment to pick himself out of the uncomfortable chair to look down on the lower platforms—steadying himself on his workstation after finding his legs operating like jelly—and noticed that everyone on the lower levels was asleep.

Sitting back down in his chair and feeling the pins and needles creep into every muscle in his body, he chanced a glance at the Commander's tier—and saw nothing. At his present angle, it would have been impossible to see anything anyhow, so that morsel of information proved quite useless.

For some reason, an image remained burned in his mind upon wakefulness: Rei Ayanami in her school uniform crawling all over his work station. He tried to find a context for the scene, but the harder he attempted to rationalize the image the more the thought fogged into the abstract.

Twenty-some minutes passed, and it seemed as though Shigeru was the only person yet to wake. His body had returned to some semblance of normality—the pins and needles had faded, and the groggy fuzz behind his eyeballs was, as predicted, gone after approximately a third of an hour. His legs were still unstable, but they relearned how to operate themselves the more he used them.

He had decided to get a cup of coffee out of the nearest break room, and had noticed that all of the clocks he encountered along the way kept flashing "12:00". An alarming fact, to be sure, especially considering that something like that only happened when the power went out—and in order for that to happen, the auxiliary backup reserve generators would have had to fail. As it was, those generators were only used after the backup reserve, the reserve, the auxiliary reserve, and the regular generators had all gone offline already.

Last time the power went out like that, it was due to sabotage.

Shigeru filed this little note into the back of his brain as he prepared the coffee he was anxious to consume. After turning the machine on, he passed the next five minutes zoning out. The sputter of the last few drops brought his attention back to the coffee maker.

He returned to the bridge with a cup of liquid black void inside the plain mug. As he sat down in his chair, Makoto started to stir.

"Ugh," the man said. "Ugh, ow. What the hell happened?"

Shigeru sipped his coffee and stared at him dully.

"I feel like I just ran a marathon and got really drunk." Makoto had yet to open his eyes, but he leaned back in the chair and cracked his back. "Ow."

When he did open his eyes and glance around, he had only one thing to say. "Is everyone else here asleep?"

Shigeru sighed and sipped more coffee. "Other than us? Yeah, it looks like."

Makoto stared enviously at the coffee in his coworker's hand. "Man, that looks good."

"If you can walk without your legs turning to jelly, there's half a pot in the break room," Shigeru said.

"Sounds good." Makoto tried to move, but succeeded only in unceremoniously falling to the floor. The chair creaked as he slipped out of it, and proceeded to roll across the platform. "Christ, you weren't kidding."

Shigeru shook his head. Reality was coming back into focus a little better.

"I think," Makoto began, paused, began again, "I think I'll just lay here for a little bit."

Both of them heard Maya suddenly groan and stretch. "Hmmm," she sighed. Her eyes opened with a few blinks, but they were quickly covered by the palms of her hands. "That was refreshing," she yawned.

Shigeru sipped more of his coffee.

Makoto grunted.

She blinked at them after regaining her composure, seeing the coffee in Shigeru's hand. "Is that coffee?" she asked.

Shigeru nodded. "Break room," he supplied.

"That sounds good." With that, Maya effortlessly got out of her chair and stepped over Makoto's prone form, leaving the bridge.

"How did she do that?" Makoto asked.

Shigeru just shrugged disinterestedly and sipped more coffee, leveling his eyes on the holoprojection that hung in the hollow expanse.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Shigeru suddenly asked.

Makoto looked at him, frowning. He was silent as he weighed his words and collected his thoughts.

"The Major," he said, finally.

"That's it?"

"Uh," Makoto's face contorted into a half-grimaced, ashamed-looking expression as he diverted his eyes. It was the closest thing to a blush Shigeru had seen him make. "She was crawling on my computer console," he mumbled quietly.

Shigeru's glance was one that suggested heavy weariness.

"I know," Makoto quickly supplied. "It doesn't make sense to me, either." He was slowly picking himself off the floor. "Ow, my arms are all full'a pins and needles," he grumbled.

"The coffee's good, Shigeru." Maya had returned from the break room with two steaming cups of coffee. "I got you some, since you seem to have a problem moving around," she said to Makoto, who had managed to lean himself against the wall by his console. "I'll just set it down here."

"Oh, how thoughtful of you," Makoto smiled his gratitude.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Shigeru asked her as she sat down.

"What?"

"Well what about you, Shig?" Makoto nodded toward his workmate. "You seem pretty curious about the last thing we remembered. What's the last thing you remember?"

Shigeru's frown became more evident as it etched across his face.

"Rei Ayanami coming for my soul."

It became easier to recollect now. The fog in his brain had cleared, and the context now was clear—Rei Ayanami crawled on his consoles at the climax of the Third Impact—touched him with shining hands—world dissolved in fear and loathing—emptiness and stage lights and void beyond the glare—

Maya raised an eyebrow. "A little dramatic," she mumbled.

Makoto snorted a laugh.

"No, think," Shigeru said. "Just think. What was the last thing you remember, Maya?"

"Nnh," now Maya looked embarrassed. "I'm not sure I want to answer—"

Before she could complete her sentence, a boom mic fell from just out of peripheral vision and landed on her head. It bounced to the floor loudly. "Ow—shit!" Coffee splashed onto her uniform as she jumped in surprise.

For a moment, no one said anything. Makoto was the one to interrupt the silence.

"That looks like a directional microphone."

Shigeru looked upwards, toward the uppermost tier of the bridge. "It was," he said.

* * *

It was the siren that woke Shinji up. He had apparently fallen asleep on the stairs of a rail station, since his wakefulness obviously found him on the stairs of a rail station.

A breeze tousled his hair and swayed cable lines overhead. A girl in his dream whispered the words "how disgusting" into his ear. He saw the words "I feel sick" at the bottom of his vision, but they similarly meant nothing to him.

"—FOR THE KANTO AREA. PLEASE PROCEED TO EVACUATION SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY. WE REPEAT—"

Rei Ayanami was across the street. Her blue hair wavered in the wind, and her body glowed with an unidentifiable pearlescent light. He glimpsed her for a fraction of a second before she disappeared, and after that he was left to wonder if she had even been there in the first place. He didn't know how he came to the conclusion that her name was Rei Ayanami—he didn't really know why he even recognized her. There was a disgustingly overwhelming wave of déjà vu that had hit him right after he woke up, and it hadn't gone away.

A missile roared low through the street and broke his stream of consciousness. The sound left his head throbbing and his ears full of whine. There was supposed to be a monster besieging the city against a brilliantly blue sky. A blue alpine was supposed to arrive in T-minus—

"Sorry I'm late."

Shinji looked up to see the passenger door already open.

"An AT-Field," Fuyutsuki yawned, gazing dispassionately at the carnage presented on the holoprojection screen.

"Mmm, yes. Conventional arms will prove useless," Gendo affirmed with about as much interest. "Just like last time."

"And the time before that," Fuyutsuki responded. He casually glanced at the nearest clock and waited for the day to end.

The monster blew something up and the screen flashed. Fuyutsuki closed his eyes and started to doze.

And then everything went black.

* * *

Shinji Ikari turned off his television set with the remote control. The screen flickered into darkness and all the people trapped inside the box went into comas. They would wake up again when someone resumed watching the show.

"Yeah, I know." The phone that Shinji had cradled between his shoulder and face showed signs of heavy use. Its faded beige coloring suggested that it had been manufactured as a tacky resurrection of 1970s. "I'll be there in a minute; I just need to get my shoes on."

The voice on the other end said something undecipherable that the microphone on the camera couldn't pick up. If needed, they could overdub that part in later.

"No, I didn't—what? I told you already. Yeah." He used his left hand to slide the phone over to the other ear. "I don't know—we can talk more when I get there. Alright. See you soon." He untangled the cord from around his arm and sat the phone back on the cradle next to the couch. He sighed as he stepped past the camera man, doing his best to avoid tapping the directional mic that protruded from underneath the lens.

"Batteries," he whispered as he gathered his shoes. "I need to get batteries while I'm out. My S-DAT's dead and I need more batteries." The camera zoomed up on his fingers as they tied the shoelaces. "And I need to figure out what to get Asuka for her birthday, but I can do that after the tutoring session." He got up and the camera zoomed out, watching him pick up his books from the nearby table and walk out the door. The deadbolt latched behind him.

Suddenly, he arrived at the library, where he met Maya Ibuki's semi-casual khaki and button down lime-green blouse-donned form. On the table in front of her was a textbook on some sort of advanced mathematics, and next to it was a sweating bottle of water. She scribbled numbers and symbols on a yellow pad of paper. The cameraman set his device on a tripod at the end of the table, taking a moment to line the shot up correctly. Maya looked up just in time.

"Hey there, Ikari. You're right on time." Her voice was warm and her mood chipper. "Everything going okay?"

Shinji nodded and politely smiled before taking his seat across from her. "Yeah," he started. "—Well, I mean, I'm still having trouble with these weird quadratic problems Akagi assigned for homework. I got numbers one and three, but two, four, five, and—um—six I can't seem to figure out."

"Quadratics are a pain in the ass, huh?" Rhetorical question. "Just wait 'till you get into college; Naoko teaches at the University I'm getting my masters at—we spend weeks on a handful of problems. It gets ridiculous."

Smash cut to:

"Psychograph readings normal," Lieutenant Ibuki recited from her station. "Pilot's readings are green."

"Angel's AT field has been neutralized. Target is silent." Even as Shigeru said this, he couldn't help but think about the redundancy of the statement—the target had vaporized itself; of course it was silent.

"Good work, Shinji. Go ahead and return to the lift." Misato's face held a familiar smile, even if Shinji's pale face reflected an unidentifiable fear that lurked just below the surface of perception.

* * *

_Gendo's brow creased sharply. "But you have already defined reality as being comprised of information."_

"_You're right," the man acknowledged. "But have you ever considered the possibility of a life form beyond our wildest comprehension? A life form existing solely as information? That's what this is. That's all we are—its thoughts given form and what we perceive to be substance."_

"_Similar to an immense artificial intelligence—a computer program."_

_The man nodded. "Sort of, yeah," he started. "But less a program and more a kind of fiction—a kind of hyper-fiction, I'd call it." He tapped his chin thoughtfully. "I'd call it the next evolution of rational storytelling; if meta-fiction is what it evolved from, then hyper-fiction would have to start with some sort of information singularity—the point at which the story itself reaches self-awareness. Meta-fiction involves a self-referential awareness on the part of the writer or storyteller, so it's essentially still a fiction, however complex—Lord of the Rings I'd almost consider in this vein, in which its word becomes its world; it's fleshed out enough to be more than believable, but it lacks the history for it to really become a true mythology. Naked Lunch and the rest of Burroughs' work as well, especially since most of the story has to be figured out by the audience anyhow."_

_He paused as he sighed and thought a little more. "As for hyper-fiction," he continued, realizing he wasn't getting a response. "Your mythologies would verge on this status. People make them real because they believe in their existence. Their dreams and ideas could, in theory, bridge that informational event-horizon that separates the mind's reality from the interactive reality."_

"_The AT-Field," Gendo said. "In order to bridge that gap, the information would have to be separated from the individual's residual ego—break down, in essence, the ego barrier itself."_

_The man shrugged. "Sure, I guess. That's the trick though, isn't it?"_

_Kaji squinted his eyes in thought. "But perception governs the individual's interpretation of information. How could anything the individual thinks be separated from the individual's inherent bias? Taking that information out of context would, by its very nature, alter the nature of the information."_

"_If the singularities we carry around in our minds had access to a sort of… informational underverse per se, then the collective unconsciousness could be the perfect depository for this kind of hyper-fictional reality to gestate."_

* * *

Ritsuko's gaze was directed at the ashtray on her desk.

"Maya, didn't you _quit _smoking?"

The lieutenant jumped a little, breaking out of some unknown reverie. "Um, I never smoked at all, Ma'am."

The Doctor frowned. The fan on the computer's hard drive kicked in.

"You didn't?" She swiveled her chair to face her assistant. "I could have sworn you did."

Maya shook her head slowly.

Ritsuko turned back to the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

"Then who's been…" Her eyes narrowed. "I bet the cleaning crew's been at it again." She picked up the cat-shaped ceramic and tilted it into the wastebasket. "I'm getting really tired finding all these cigarettes in my ashtray," she said as she set the thing down. She reached into her the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, only to find that it was empty.

"Shit," she mumbled under her breath as she crushed it, before tossing it into the garbage. "Maya, when you get a chance, would you mind grabbing another pack of cigarettes for me? You know the kind."

Maya sighed and shrugged, but Ritsuko didn't see this.

* * *

Gendo flopped the report onto his desk, coolly gazing at the rest of the committee.

"This is a brief report on the recent reality schism NERV and surrounding areas experienced at approximately fourteen-hundred this afternoon," he said. The report he had set on his desk was well over a hundred pages. "While we are still unable to determine the source of the intrusion, it was apparent that our existences were briefly superseded by some sort of hyperdimensional alternate reality that acted in place of our own."

SEELE 05 had a comment. "One moment, Commander."

Gendo's eyes darted to the steel-faced monolith of the interrupter.

"I'm leafing through this report," SEELE 05 continued, "and I seem to have identified a mistake." The monolith paused.

"Continue," Gendo said, carefully eyeing the featureless black pillar.

"On page… sixty-three, about the middle of the fourth paragraph, you've written 'thus spake the welkin at the behest of three cosmological solenoid personas, and lo, they forbade me to answer all save the ringing of this burning pyre'. I believe that you have misplaced your commas—if I recall my language skills correctly, there should not be a comma between 'personas' and 'and'."

Gendo's brow creased as he mulled over the absurdity of the statement. Quickly, he flipped to the sixty-third page of the report and found the excerpt in question.

"With all due respect, I find your assertion to be mistaken," Gendo said. "It is a compound sentence, in which case _both _the comma _and_ the coordinate conjunction are necessary to facilitate a proper division between the clauses at hand."

SEELE 10 spoke up. "I'm not inclined to agree with that opinion, Ikari."

"Yes, it seems a trifle arbitrary," SEELE 08's vaguely British voice nasally consented. "By what criteria would you judge a clause against, I wonder?"

Gendo removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"A clause," he started, coughed a chuckle, tried to subdue the cries of hilarity that rumbled in the back of his brain, "A clause is a complete statement with a subject and a verb," he said. "In order to convey two clauses within one sentence, they must either be divided by a semicolon or by a comma proceeded by a conjunction. Depending on the nature of the relationship these ideas share, this conjunction can be either a coordinate conjunction—in this case, 'and'—or a subordinate conjunction such as 'but'."

SEELE 05 made a humming sound. "I see," he said after a little while. "It seems your reasoning is correct. I am, indeed, mistaken."

SEELE 01 spoke: "This conversation was meaningless, you realize. Japanese is structured—"

"Whoa, Japanese?!" SEELE 02 promptly made a sharp whistle. "Hold the bus! This isn't Japanese at all!"

SEELE 04 responded, "Number Two is right. We cannot speak in English and make believe it is Japanese. That would be absurd."

"My imagination isn't capable of that. If it were, my avatar would be something more interesting that a featureless rectangle." SEELE 08 agreed.

"Wait, if this isn't Japanese, then how can it be English?" SEELE 11 spoke for the first time. "I clearly remember speaking in these omniscient baritones since... well…"

"Since we were first introduced to each other," SEELE 12 finished for him.

This prompted a short period of confused mumblings from various council members.

"Baritones?"

"Who's Barry?"

"I don't play saxophone."

"I've got a vocoder on mine; that's why it sounds so kickass."

"Mine kind of sounds like I'm speaking into a conch shell."

"Enough!" SEELE 01's partially synthesized voice resounded through the presumably holographic chamber. Silence prevailed, and Gendo Ikari's frown couldn't get any deeper.

"I believe the answer to Number Eleven's question can be found in the report," Gendo finally said. "If you'll flip to section fifty-seven point one, you'll find a brief synopsis of our hypotheses concerning the reality schism's effect on our streams of consciousness. One surmounting correlation, we believe, is an alteration to our linguistic pattern recognition subroutines in our brains, and the subsequent corrosion of our dialectic speech inhibitors to the central processing units of our attention spans."

"It seems Descartes was accurate in his prediction that we would all be machines before the future waned," one of the council members stupidly remarked.

Gendo, unable to endure the ludicrous session any longer, reached into his desk and pulled out the dated phone. "Fuyutsuki," he mumbled into the receiver, "immediate extraction required. Subroutine Six, just like we practiced."

* * *

"A-Asuka…"

"Go away." Her words were barely audible. "All you ever do is hurt me."

"But I don't want to," he said. "All I ever cause anybody is pain, but—but that's never what I ever wanted. Sometimes I just wish that I—that I'd never been born at—"

"Don't say it." She buried her head deeper into her arms. "Don't you dare say it, you coward."

"Asuka…"

She pulled her face off the table. It was red and flushed and stained with tears. Her eyes were bloodshot and angry and despairing.

"Look at you," she said.

"I'm trying to _help_ you."

"But you're only trying to help me because you can't stand yourself!" she yelled. "How can you expect to help me when you can't even stand up for yourself? Or understand yourself? How can you expect to help me when you can't even _like_ yourself?"

"But you expect me to help you!"

"I do not!"

"Then why—then what's with—"

"Just stay away from me. All you ever do is hurt me."

"We don't have to keep hurting each other, Asuka." Shinji offered his hand in retribution and consolation, offering the warmest smile he could. Her stare was blank, but tinged with some underlying enmity that Shinji couldn't quite relate to.

And she dove into his arms! "Oh Shinji, how I've been yearning to hear you say that!" she cheerfully declared!

"I've always loved you, Asuka." He said tenderly and full of confidence! "From that very first perfect moment on the aircraft carrier, I knew we were meant for one another."

"We were destined forever," she softly crooned, snuggling into his embrace.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang! I wonder who THAT could be…

Shinji broke from the embrace and kissed Asuka on the cheek. "I'll be right back, so don't you go anywhere."

She winked at him and waved as he left the kitchen (what the fuck?), turning into the blushing little schoolgirl she was.

Shinji slid open the door, only to be just ONE of COUNTLESS victims in an unprecedented REALITY SCHISM!

* * *

"Well I—I didn't, want, um…" Shinji looked around, uncertainly. Maya stood in the doorway, rubbing her eyes with her sleeves in an attempt to hide the bloodshot whites. "I didn't want you to leave so upset," he finally said. "I don't like it when people are upset, and I—and I just couldn't bear it if it was because of me…"

"Shinji…" Maya couldn't help but grin through the tears that had started to form. "It wasn't you," she whispered. "It was me… I just… I can't accept it." She turned away. "God, I'm sorry Shinji. I just hadn't been able to—I still can't—your age just—I can't get over the fact that you're just fourteen!" she wailed. "If only you were older… nobody's shown me what you have, like that, before… but… oh god…" She sobbed on, she felt uncomfortable, vulnerable, revealed before him, frightened.

She felt something touch her shoulder—his hand. "Maya…"

She had backed up; her back pressed against the wall of her own apartment foyer, the door hissed closed, his flowers fell to the floor, and just as he was closing the distance between them with his lips, she screamed. It was a scream like no other he had heard before. Her eyes focused on something nearly imperceptible that was just beyond his peripheral vision—and her scream was a heart-shattering exclamation of utter repulsion, like the icy tendrils of some unnamable fear poured into her throat and yanked and twisted and crushed her soul.

"Shinji," she cried. "Shinji!" She closed her eyes forcefully and held onto him. Her head got dizzy and her knees weak.

He called her name and twisted to see what she had seen—and he did. It was blazon and bold and irrefutable. It was hideous in its sincerity. The truth was as ugly as the lies had been.

"Make it stop! Make it leave! Get out! It—no! No!" Her sobs and shrieks stilled his heart.

His pupils dilated.

He remembered Kaji's words. He remembered the television. He remembered everything.

And there was a lens staring him in the face. Deep as the void, domed as the sky, it was held aloft in a short man's grip as he steadied it on his shoulder. The man seemed indifferent to their cries; with one eye squeezed shut, he had the other focused in on a viewfinder on the side. His hat read "KAME" in huge letters. His jeans were blue.

"This can't be happening," Maya whimpered.

"This can't be real," Shinji shivered. "This—this is—this has to be—"

"Don't say it!" Maya begged. "Don't please, this is all I have left!" Her screams were horrible and filled with a primal terror.

"Kaji was right all along!" He screamed, and his voice cracked on the first syllable of 'along', camera zooming in on his distress. "He was right all along! All along! He was right all alo—"

* * *

"_Look, it's really quite simple," the man said. "It's like this: reality exists…" _


	7. The Return of the Thin White Duke

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Neon Genesis: Evangelion_.

**Author's Note:** Chapter title from the song "Station to Station", by David Bowie.

Wow, finally here. Special thanks to my reviewers! Also note: last chapter had some goof-ups in formatting (the dividers disappeared for some reason), but it's been fixed. If you haven't checked it out yet, it's a green light and everything's cool.

**Violet Shadows**, hell yeah! I crank the badass up to 11 in this chapter. **Nemesis Zero**, I'd seriously considered explicitly alluding to Rebuild… in fact, that was one of the things that kept this story held up in production for so long. BUT, seeing as how I haven't seen 2.0 yet, I felt that I didn't have anything to really comment on. Instead, I figured that the very _concept_ of Rebuild—the idea of reinterpreting one's own work—was more important that the reinterpretation itself. And along those lines is the notion of what this actually does to "canon" (LOL!) and in-universe meaning. This comes through most prominently in this chapter, but my goal was to make it retroactively applicable to all other chapters as well. **This is my name**, haha, well, NGE & EoE aren't exactly an easy viewings either. Some of the post-modern stuff does tend to get a little out of hand, I admit, but I have no problem laying this stuff on thick. **anonymous**, I'll take that as a compliment!

So without further ado, BEHOLD:

EDIT 05/02/2010: Fixed strange formatting errors that occured sometime in the past several months. Again.

* * *

**Nightlife 4.0: The Return of the Thin White Duke**

* * *

Camera glide slowly down Hallway Seven, short thing runs about fifteen feet in either direction with a thirteen-step stairwell at one end and a chest of red at other, four doors in total lined neatly two on each side with beige carpet on floor. Camera close in on last door on left; it's cracked open an inch and a sliver of pale yellow light falls like deadwood on surfaces of otherwise darkened hallway. A singular voice can be heard faintly at first, but slowly it gains volume as camera approaches.

"…like I said, if it doesn't have green girls or tubes or weird cybernetic shit, I'm just _not_ interested. Yeah, that's what _I _said to him, but he still tried to get me to watch the damn thing. Did I like it?—sure, sure, it was OK. But shit, it didn't have any of that weird shit—y'know, I watched this one thing that had a motorcycle chick in it. No, not like leather 'n all that, no; I mean like the girl _was_ the motorcycle—she had handlebars and a gas tank on her back, and her head transformed into a gun… yeah… oh, I can't remember, this was what, ten years ago?"

The door opens enough to let the camera glide in, still at floor level. It has to turn a few times to maneuver around two bookshelves, but then comes to a small open space: a dresser and a desk on one side, a bed lines the other—all surfaces save the bed's are covered in worn books and cables, comics, a guitar, various reams and scraps of paper, the floor has three dirty socks in the foreground. A man sits Indian-style on a metallic fold-up chair by the desk in profile, the windows to his left have their shades drawn. He rambles on into the cellular phone.

"Yeah, it was strange. Good times, man, back when cartoons were worth something. When'll I what? I right, yeah. It's getting done right now, it'll be posted someday. Not like I've got a deadline, man. Oh right? Right. Alright, later."

He claps the thing shut and throws it onto the desk. It hits a chessboard and a shitty paperback copy of _The Beautiful and Damned_. He sighs.

"Chapter Seven," he groans, running a hand over his face. "Chapter Seven."

* * *

Commander Ikari:  
My cat died—  
The one my grandmother had been taking care of.  
I hadn't seen it in such a long time,  
But now I know that I'll never see it ever again.

So long, Pen-Pen.

* * *

Shinji Ikari flexed his twig like arms through his plug suit.

"I am Shinji Ikari!" He bellowed! "I am destroyer of evil! Super magnificent Evangelion I pilot! Stupendous fatherly relationship I wish to inherit gladly! Instead settle I for sexy roommates I'm too gentlemanly to make advances on even though they supremely want it!"

"Shinji! We are happy harem family remember!" Misato Katsuragi called from the hallway. "All sexy stocking equals success rate increase! Tactical embraces of motherly warmth are must!"

"Yes, right are you!" Shinji cartwheeled out of the locker room and stood on his hands. "Observe these supreme reflexes! I am changed person now! I am better than was before! Here I am doing this again!"

Asuka's mouth watered, but her tongue was sharp. "You stupid! Nether region moistening be damned, I see ghosts of my past." She pointed an accusing finger. "Shinji you stupid! Comfort me in my times of need! I am weak feminine creature; need big strong man arms like yours! Give me love and warmth!"

"OK!" Shinji gladly accepted this bizarre misappropriation of reality with open arms. "Here is love! Here is happiness! Asuka my beloved!" He embraced her swiftly. Asuka blushed like the schoolgirl she was. Rei felt jealous.

"Are tears mine? Do I cry? Am I real?" She wept in silence amid the cacophony of emotions. "Do I wish for Ikari? Yes, I do! Give me Ikari flesh like Shinji!"

"Do you wish for 1?" Misato asked, smiling.

"I wish for 1!" Shinji affirmed.

"Do you want to be 1?" Asuka joyously asked.

"I want to be 1!" Shinji affirmed.

"Let us become 1!" Rei giddily cried.

"We'll become 1!" Shinji affirmed.

Shinji Ikari observed this in morbid silence that verged on disgust. "What the hell am I _seeing_?"

"Clutch fist dramatic stance, I wish to be 1!!" Shinji affirmed once again, clutching his fist and assuming a dramatic stance.

"Is this… real?" Shinji whispered.

"1!"

"Okay folks, that's enough! Let's cut it at that."

Shinji moved three paces left, and suddenly realized the horrible optical illusion he had been held a victim of. There really _were_ pulleys and levers behind the scenes of existence—this whole experience had been nothing but a scene rehearsal for some bizarre reality program.

The director wearily stood from his folding chair and stretched as the cast members wandered off in separate directions. "God, I thought this scene would never fucking end," he yawned. "Somebody refill this coffee—would—hey, thanks dear." A blonde with short shorts and a t-shirt that said "KAME" in huge letters filled his empty thermos with a pitcher of black steaming fluid. Shinji watched this in shock and awe.

"Hey, you there!" The director pointed at Shinji. "What are you doing on set? Are you authorized for this kind of clearance?—it'd be news to me, seeing as how I haven't seen your face 'round here before."

"I—I uh, I got… um… what?" He scratched his head and started having trouble identifying with his situation.

"You! You're on set! Why the hell are you on set—and for that matter—" The director gazed past his shoulder and shouted; his mouth opened up into a comical hole in his face, red tongue curled back like a carpet, teeth jutting out of pasty gums. "Security! Security! What the fuck, man?! Where's the fucking security in this godforsaken hellhole of a set?!" He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed before addressing Shinji again. "Look, apparently the blue-button jackoffs all took a snooze break or something, so I can't really blame you for wandering in here. Just… I dunno, just don't get in our way. Sit over there, off to the side or, well, something. Your folks know you're here?"

"My what?"

"Jezus Christ, kid. Look, just don't get in the way." The director lumbered off towards a small cluster of people, mumbling under his breath "Friggin' kids these figgin' days…"

* * *

What Shinji had no way of knowing were the goings on in the locker room, a room and a half away from his position. A purposefully-mundane character that had been briefly introduced in the first chapter was busy preparing himself for the arrival of Ragnarok, donning his cloak and make-up; he carefully brushed an epoxy onto his face in order to simulate an old scar.

"Scar, the Claw," he whispered, eye wide and fingers steady. "Scar, the Claw. Be the Claw. Be Scar, the Claw. I am Scar. I _must be_ Scar." He frowned as he pondered his lines, absently biting his cheek and looking at the make-up pallet on the counter before him.

"Flax Hardseed, your time has come!" He frowned deeper, scowling. "Flax Hard_seed_, your time has come!" He put the brush down and stared at himself. "Flax Hardseed! Prepare to die!" He blinked and sighed and tried to relax, but jumped back into character quickly. "Flax Hardseed—your time here is over! Prepare to die!"

He clapped the make-up pallet shut and threw the brush in a nearby sink, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Who the fuck wrote this script?" he sighed.

* * *

"I am have become 1!" An industrial fan behind him simulated dramatic winds. Flax Hardseed stood perched on the consoles, fist clenched before him, and Shinji Ikari the Pilot of Shogouki pointed towards him. "Now you are becomes 0!"

"For every positive, there is a negative! Shinji Ikari, prepare for complete polarity reversal! You are in nothingspace for soontime to begin!" Flax Hardseed's yell was triumphant and momentous.

Suddenly, Scar, the Claw, jumped down into view. "Flax Hardseed, your time has come!" he bellowed against the industrial fan. "Prepare to die!"

"B-but who!" Shinji spun in his plugsuit. His hair washed around his head as though his body were an agitator. "It can't be!"

"It be! Shinji, I am Scar, the Claw! But also—" Scar pulled off the cloth on his hand and revealed an embryonic palm. He perched glasses on his nose. "Also am I the Gendo Ikari!"

"No! Be it not so!" Shinji's pupils dilated.

"Impossible!" Flax seethed. "I killed you back in Chapter 02!"

"It be so! And I return once more to sway the ratings of this petulant creation!" He lunged.

The Director stood from his folding chair and said, "Cut! OK. We'll just blue-screen the resta this shit later on."

Gendo broke character and turned toward the director. "Serious? This scene wasn't very long."

The Director shrugged noncommittally. "I'm just following his directions, man." He gestured towards Flax Hardseed with his fan. "He's the boss."

Gendo returned his gaze to Flax Hardseed as the palefaced psychotic let loose a maniacal laugh that filled the studio. From his spot by the wall, Shinji Ikari shuddered and shivered and twitched as he was seized by an unnamable, Lovecraftian terror. He stared deep into the jaws of avarice and decay as the hollow chortle opened up the floodgates of morbid curiosity and deep seated psychoses within Shinji's very being.

* * *

Soft hands were kneading his shoulders and neck when he felt himself start to wake. With a sigh and a groan, he rubbed his eyes and opened them, taking in the sight of another NERV break room. There was a pot of coffee on.

He hummed pleasantly at the adroitness of the masseuse. A train was slowly spiraling into the GeoFront, but all of its windows were dark and unlit. He frowned as he noticed this. The pot of coffee bubbled and hissed. One of the girl's hands moved up and snaked its way into his hair, rubbing his scalp just like Rei sometimes would when they were alone.

"Rei, that feels really good," he sighed.

The hand stopped suddenly, and the temperature in the room dropped dramatically. He imagined the coffee spilling on him and a table flipping over. Shit.

There were hands around his neck, and the hands were strangling him.

And it really, really hurt.

* * *

A vending machine malfunctioned and spat out a can of soda. It fizzed open and orange LCL pooled around it. Shinji's breath was haggard and choked as he clawed at the fingers that slowly crushed his windpipe. The figure of Rei Ayanami congealed in the ooze and stood naked before him, smiling down in benevolence like a statue of some virgin mother. She held his head to her fourteen-year-old breast, even as the hands continued to stifle the life out of him.

"How does it feel?" Asuka's voice hissed these words into his ear, and they were biting and poisoned and full of hatred and loneliness. "How does this feel, Shinji?"

"This is your guilt," Rei told him.

"Then what are you?" he tried to say, but the words were mangled and hoarse.

She smiled when she released his head, and the hands around his throat pulled him backwards over the bench. He landed on the floor gasping in agony. Asuka's towering form blocked out the fluorescent light like a wide-angle shot of a gallows pole at noon.

"Even now, you deny what you really want?" She cried. Her foot dug into his ribcage.

"Do you even _know_ what you want?" Rei asked calmly.

They burst into LCL, and it rained down on Shinji's body. It rolled and beaded across his school uniform, sliding off into a single puddle, and that congealed into the upper torso of Gendo Ikari. He was missing his glasses.

"Shinji," he said.

"F-father?" It was a terrified gaze.

"How do you feel?" Gendo asked calmly.

"How d-do I—how do I _feel?_" Shinji shook himself of and stood up, staring down at the torso. It had arms and Gendo's head, but it was missing a waist and everything below that. "You're just—you're missing—what the—"

Gendo stared down at himself, knowing the truth. "I know how it looks, Shinji," he mumbled. "Nothing is going to be alright."

Shinji shook his head. "What do you mean?"

"So long as the sun, the moon, and the stars exist, there will always be suffering, misery, and death. For as long as we survive, we will never be free. Human will has lost all capacity for understanding and happiness, cementing itself in the apathetic cycles of hollow joy and vicious self loathing. You have borne witness to this. Human beings simply do not want to be happy, Shinji. That's all there is to it." Gendo used his arms to crawl over to a vending machine, leaving a streak of blood that leaked out of his torso in his wake. He tried to reach for a button, but his arms weren't long enough. Eventually he stopped, and leaned back against the machine.

"There is only one true solution to this predicament. There is only one road of survival that dodges the paths of brain-numbing ignorance and absolute insanity." He gazed at the linoleum tiles as he said these words.

Shinji found a word to punctuate the silence. "…Instrumentality?"

Gendo sighed. "Give me an orange soda, and I'll tell you."

The boy fished around in his pockets for some change, and managed to produce a few coins that he deposited into the machine. He pressed a button. A bottle fell into its mouth. Gendo fished it out and opened it with ease.

"Thank you," he said.

Shinji stood awkwardly, uncertain. "…Dad?"

"Mm," Gendo hummed as he took a drink. "Yes?"

"Are we bonding?"

Gendo sighed again, and he didn't look at his son. "There is only one path that may find solace to counteract to existence," he said. He paused again, though this time it was for dramatic effect. "Badassness," he enunciated. "Although we can never be free, we can always strive to be badass. It is only through badass that we may find any semblance of peace and comprehension." He clenched his fist, losing himself in his monologue. "And it is from there that we may strike at the heart of existence; it is from that path that we may finally understand the reason for our suffering."

"I don't understand a word you're saying," Shinji said. "You're as incoherent as Kaji was a few days ago—"

"We're breaking continuity, Shinji." The boy stopped talking immediately. When Gendo had his attention, he continued: "Every time I live, I make the same mistakes. Every death I experience is the result of an infinitely-recurring nightmare of causality over which I have abolished my control." He gestured to the bloody part of his torso. "I'm dying, Shinji. I'm dying on a metaphysical level—the reality containment wave that NERV had secretly been developing in order to subdue Flax Hardseed backfired, and now all involved are experiencing character-death."

Shinji looked at him oddly. "What _is_ Flax Hardseed?"

"He is… he is a refraction of a higher dimension as it filtered into this one. The universe is composed of information, and Flax Hardseed is the result of too much data existing in one dimensional pocket. We believe him to be some sort of god, like an author who inserted himself into a story, but even this is an incorrect analogy. To be honest, we simply don't know." He took another gulp of orange soda.

Shinji said nothing.

"Shinji," he grasped onto Shinji's pant leg with his left hand, staring up at him intensely. "Throw away your humanity and your benevolence, I beg of you. Cast your reason to the winds. Shed your humility like a snake sheds its skin, and become what you were _born_ to be! You are of my flesh and blood, and you must succeed where I have failed. You are an _Ikari_; succumb to the debauchery of the moment and allow entropy to guide your actions. This is the nature of badass—this is how the universe must be saved from the threat that is Flax Hardseed."

"But how can I do that when I don't even know what you're talking about?!" he shouted. It broke Gendo out of his concentration.

"Don't know what I'm talking about…" Gendo whispered. The dawn of comprehension overtook his features. He released his son's leg and fell against the vending machine. "Of course, it wasn't you at all, was it? All this time, I had been relying on you, but it wasn't ever intended to be you at all… Where we failed, you were to be the vicarious messiah, but I never realized the error of such a judgment until now. I can't believe it. It… it was supposed to be… supposed to be K… Ka…" And just as he grasped at the light of understanding, he bled to death. He spilled the orange soda as his hand fell to the floor.

"Father?" The vending machine answered him with ominous hums. Silence was an arbitrary specter. The camera crew was this boy's only witness. "Father, please…"

And then, nothing.

* * *

Shinji opened his eyes and stared at a fluorescent light. His back was sore from leaning across the bench in the break room. When he saw Kaworu, he blinked and rubbed his eyes.

"Kaworu…" Shinji mumbled, shifting his fingers to his temples in an attempt to alleviate a throbbing headache. The escalator to his left hummed and churned, some interval resembling a diatonic third below the hum of the vending machines.

The grey-haired boy looked up from a ream of papers in his hand and smiled. It was somewhere between bemused and gentle, with only a hint of underlying comprehension.

"I had the strangest dream just now," Shinji said. "I can't remember it, but I know it was… really weird." Kaworu said nothing, and Shinji remained silent for a few minutes to soak in his surroundings. The vending machines and the escalator were the only voices for a while. "What are you doing here, anyway? Were you watching me sleep?"

Kaworu chuckled. "It was about time I made an appearance," he said. "I was delayed by licensing problems. The folks on high had some issues with my contract and they refused to listen to reason." He let loose a sigh and waved the pages around. "But my agent hammered out a negotiation that'll inevitably come out of my paycheck, so I managed to get the part after all." He grinned.

"…Huh?"

"The part," Kaworu repeated. He stepped closer to Shinji and lowered the pages to within Shinji's vision. "I'm the last angel. You have to kill me, but that doesn't happen until the end of the episode."

"Kaworu, I-I don't understand." Shinji stuttered. "I have to kill you?" He looked at the pages when Kaworu's benevolent face was the only response. "Is this a script?"

"Will everything you say today be a question?"

"A question?—hey!" Kaworu chuckled again and Shinji snatched the pages from his grip, looking over them. "This looks like it's for a TV show—"

"Shinji!" Kaji stepped off the escalator and waved, quirking his trademark expression. "Hey, it's time to go! Misato's waiting for you in the garage."

"Oh, uh—" Shinji looked back to Kaworu in an attempt to return the script, but Kaworu was gone. His hands held onto nothing.

"What was that?" Kaji asked. "It looked like you had something in your hands."

"Um—no—it was nothing." He clenched his left hand as he stood up. That was really weird.

Kaji frowned, and Shinji missed the strange glint in his eye. "Well, let's go then. It's already pretty late."

The decent down the escalator was long and filled with an uneasy tension. It seemed like it was taking longer than usual, but Shinji didn't want to say anything. Eventually, he relented.

"Um, Kaji? It seems like we're going down an awful long way." He tried to swallow the lump in his throat. He didn't even know why it was there. "Isn't the garage farther up than this?"

Kaji just grinned. "Don't worry, Shinji; it's not too long now."

Turns out, it WAS that much longer; after reaching the terminus of the escalator, Kaji led the boy through various unexplored hallways and corridors, down several more flights of stairs and one or two other uncomfortable escalator descents, until finally they duo came upon a mundane-looking emergency exit door whose red surface was nicked and pitted and the stainless steel shined through the paint. They were many yards and meters beneath the surface of the earth by then.

"Shinji!" Behind them, a haggard and scratchy voice called out. It was worn thin from trillions of imaginary cigarettes. "Shinji, you have to listen to me—" It seemed like it was accompanied by fast footfalls that gained intensity as the distance between them decreased.

Kaji frowned and spun, his hand darting into his jacket and pulling out his sidearm. "Well," he said, cracking another grin as if it were a Marlboro. "You're a little late, aren't you?"

The door closed behind Shinji. Kaji was trapped on the other side with… whomever that was. Though the voice _had _sounded familiar… almost like—

A V-TOL crashed in front of him and he crouched out of reflex, falling on his ass with his hands over his face. Flames licked and swirled around him, glass shattered, the building to his left caved in and started to collapse. The blue Alpine jay-turned and the passenger-side door swung open thanks to inertia. Misato Katsuragi stared down at the boy.

"Hey there, am I late?"

They sped off toward the GeoFront. "They're alien invaders, Shinji. They've come to claim the land of the rising sun out of jealousy. Destroy these gaijin beasts." She brought him up to speed as the train crawled down the edge of the immense subterranean cavern. "Help us, Shinji Ikari; you're our only hope."

"We need you." Gendo Ikari stared down at him from on high, behind mom, between the subtle symbolism of EARTH that was merely an optical illusion formed by the pattern of fluorescent lights. Shinji turned around and watched Asuka get her head torn off by a doll with papier-mâché fold-up steel arms. Battleships plunged through the mouth of an enormous evil manatee.

Kensuke shrugged as he stirred the rice in the pot. "It's like a giant-robot version of _Love & Pop_. I mean _Shiki-Jutsu_, that's what I'm trying to say. We're about as far from _Angel's Egg_ as you could possibly get." The cicadas were loud and annoying. Scenery pillow-shot montage will be repeated through rest of series as budget dwindles. "_Otaku no Video_, get it?" The wind ruffles his hair.

"Death may be the only absolute freedom there ever was." Crosses lit up skies. Great white domes decimated cities. Destiny and righteousness shuddered at the floodgates of dawn. Fear was only an escape.

"All I can do is water these melons, Shinji." Kaji holding his sprinkler suggestively, gunfire zooms overhead and the same explosions repeat themselves as if caught in an animation loop. "Does she still sleep sprawled all over the bed?"

"Nani?" What?

"Of course _he_ isn't here."

"This is the _longest_ I've _ever_ waited for a man before. How long does it take to deliver something like that?"

"You're leaving already?"

"Leaving?"

"You're a little late, aren't you?"

"All you ever do is hurt me."

"That moron's never on time."

"I think I am the third."

"Don't come near me. All you ever _do_ is hurt me."

"We don't want to be the last ones still single."

"Did you ever try to understand?"

"You were all you had, but you never even learned to _like_ yourself."

"Everything I have is kept in my heart."

"I swear, it's like everyone is itching to marry before they turn thirty."

"Your heart is fragile, like glass."

"Look at the newlyweds!"

"I'm leaving, and I won't be back for a few days. I asked Kaji to stick around and watch you guys, so be good!"

"You won't even hold me!"

"Oh great. Are you two fighting _again_?"

"If I can't have you all to myself…"

"That stuff's not for kids."

"Why are you crying?"

"Good job, Shinji."

"…then I want _nothing_ to do with you." Blue eyes written in bold, emblazoned by the sunset beyond unreachable panes of glass. These tombs were words etched in silence.

He couldn't keep up.  
He couldn't take it anymore.  
But Shinji mustn't run away.  
Was the scream Ogata's or Spencer's, I wonder?  
Though in the end, I guess it doesn't matter.

"A-Asuka…" His hands gripped the pale forehead slick with a feverish sweat. "I don't know what's going on anymore."

"You're a little late, aren't you?"  
SLAP, but for all ya Westerners, ADV changed it to BLAM! Haha! How's that for screwing with the product?!

"Liar."

* * *

Kaworu took the ream of papers back from Shinji, and proceeded to kick him squarely in the chest. Shinji fell against the face of the vending machine like a limp fish. The hum of the escalators and the machines droned on.

Shinji didn't move. "I killed you, Kaworu. I killed you—"

"Shinji," Kaworu half-grinned in jest. "It's only a script. See? I'm right here."

Shinji didn't look at him. He instead curled up on the floor and stared at the dirt in between the cold linoleum tiles. "But who are you?"

"I'm your friend. That's all I ever was." He extended a hand down to Shinji. The boy on the floor shuddered in fear and loathing and despair. "I'm just Kaworu. Plain, simple, Kawo—"

"I don't believe you!" Shinji screamed. He tried to bury his head further into the shelter of his arms and chest, but to no avail. "I can't believe anything anymore! None of this is happening! None of it ever happened! I can't believe in someone who would do such a thing!"

Kaworu recoiled in shock, his arm flinching into goosebumps. "Shinji…"

"I was only ever a tool!" he cried. "I was just used by crazy fucking psychos! How do you expect me to react?! You betrayed my feelings!"

Kaworu's eye twitched strangely.

"Giant human robots and my mother's soul and spies and car chases and hostile takeovers and giant monsters and—and—and cloning laboratories and secret expeditions to Antarctica and—and a secret death cult and puppet governments and—oh my god…" Shinji kicked backwards on the floor and tried to slide away from Kaworu, who gazed at him in awe. Shinji returned his gaze, utterly appalled. "Why didn't I ever _see_ it before?" He lifted his arm, straight and narrow, his finger extended like a lance pointed at Kaworu's face. "You're him, aren't you? You're Flax Hardseed! You aren't Kaworu at all! _You're_ _Flax Hardseed!_"

Kaworu's voice shifted and modulated and his outline blurred and distorted. He lifted off his face and there was madness underneath. Sharks' teeth held dominance between the lips of the devil.

"You're… Flax… Flax Hardseed…" Shinji's ability to comprehend the reality of the situation finally collapsed in on itself. All that was left of his identity shriveled up into a ball of cowardice and misery and numbness and waited for the day to end.

Flax Hardseed smiled triumphant. "Shinji Ikari," he hissed. His bloodshot and bleeding eyes burned holes in perception. The thin film surrounding existence bubbled and darkened, curved inwards, and melted away in patchy holes. The screen came away like melted cheese.

"I am Maldoror and Morgoth and Cthulu. I am hatred and destruction and betrayal. I am the anger that fills the nothingness of sorrow. I am the pain that empties into the void of sadness." The voice was omnipresent and mocking.

"You're evil," Shinji whimpered. "You're f-fucking evil!"

"No," Flax grinned. "Evil is merely an illusion cast by a shadow of perception. Your rationalization of reality is incapable of comprehending the magnitude of existence." She leaned in close to his ear, and all Shinji could see was the emptiness of the sky, all he could feel was the coldness of the earth against his back; the scent of Flax Hardseed wafted into his nostrils and smelled like home. Her lips were poisoned ruby rosebuds that spoke truth in a serpent's voice. "I am illusion, my friend. And you are my puppet." His laugh was rough and cosmic.

Suddenly, the haggard, unshaven, bloodshot, and terribly unclean Kaji Ryoji burst out of one of the vending machines as if breaking down a door with the sole of his boot. He waved a pistol around angrily, his breath smelled like alcohol and unhappiness, the twitch in his forearm warned of insanity.

"Shinji, get back! Get back from that thing!" He cried. Shinji looked at him oddly. "Do it, or so help me I'll shoot _through_ you!"

Shinji fell over. Kaji shot off six rounds. Flax Hardseed's head burst like a watermelon.

"K-Kaji—what—what—gah—" Shinji stuttered.

Flax Hardseed's body slumped to the ground and blood poured out of holes in its skull. One eye had come dislodged, the other stared vacantly at the ground—its optic nerve plainly visible as it snaked into the bloodied head.

"You fool," the skull hissed. "You're such a fool, Ryoji. How could you not comprehend the magnitude of this transgression? How could you not understand the reasoning behind your disposal?"

"You're wrong, Flax Hardseed!" Kaji grinned manically, assuredly, full of confidence. He reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and retrieved a control box with a cartoonishly large red button on its top. "This is the button that ends everything, Flax. This is the device that turns off the television, Flax Hardseed. This is the power button for existence!" He was practically foaming at the mouth. "Kensuke Aida wrote it into the script ages ago, and I finally realized its purpose! You are the result of these horrendous machinations! You were the cause of your own existence! There is a single point in time, Flax Hardseed, where all causalities intersect—and it is you!"

"You stupid, pathetic moron," the skull seethed. "You've doomed us all with your meaningless existential irreverence. Don't try to play games with me, Ryoji; that button ends _nothing_. All you'll succeed in doing is turning off our awareness—are you willing to be responsible for another reboot of continuity? Are you willing to sacrifice the gains we have made? Are you ready to be held liable for _yet another_ retcon?"

Kaji squinted at the talking skull and looked at Shinji. Shinji's eyes glanced up at him, full of fear and uncertainty. When he looked away, Kaji looked back at the skull.

"You fucking bet I am." And he pushed the button.


End file.
